Threads' big moment, and Sony's big controller

24:40I'm just putting that vibe in the world. We've sent the emails. If you know them, you have a line to them, tell them to come on stage. I want to talk about social media with them. Yeah, they'd be good. I'm into it. We will find a way to... Code is the same day as MetaConnect, also happening in September. But we have some ideas. I'm bringing those folks onto our stage. I won't spoil them at this time. What David said makes me think of two things. One thing is, first, I like having eight different social media apps. to open and see different things. It's cool. When I'm sick of TikTok, I can go to Blue Sky.

25:13When I'm sick of Blue Sky, I can go to Macedon. When I'm sick of Macedon, I can go to Threads. Then I can go back to Twitter and see what's going on. Do you know what I love about this, Richard? I genuinely cannot tell if you're serious. Like, I sincerely don't know whether that was, like, full sarcasm or earnest honesty. What is happening right now is that David and I have children and Richard doesn't. And Richard's like, you know what is sick is bar hopping. And both of us are like, we're too tired. That is 100 % the dynamic that just happened on this show. Which is like, I like waking up on a Sunday and going to five different bars and just checking it.

25:44I'm like, I can't. I'm so sleepy, man. Like, who doesn't just have unlimited time to open every single app on their phone over and over and over again? Is that not your experience? Look, when I was in Chicago, I was an inveterate bar crawler. I understand, you know? You got drum and bass at one. You got house at the other. And you got to just feel the vibes through the night. Maybe you're going to link, you know, anything could happen here on this internet. And then you get older and you're like, I can't be doing this anymore. And I think for a lot of people, that is a social media experience.

26:18So 2023 is like, well, I'm just like, just tell me which one's cool. Like, which one has onion rings? And my friends are going to be there. Like, I'll be at that one. First of all, it's not onion rings. It's free pizza in the back. Like, that's the thing. Yeah. But also, wait, Richard, that was thing one. What was thing two? Thing two is that, yes, it feels like Twitter's been hollowed out. I follow like 7000 people, which is not the normal experience and always use the chronological feed. So I kind of see a lot of different communities and how people are talking and a lot of very important voices, like you said, either don't post at all or just don't post on that platform anymore.

26:51But there's still people who do. So I think for a lot of people, the thing that has that they've experienced on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it, is that it has always been so bad that if you use it, there's nothing that it could do that could make it so bad that you won't use it anymore. They've already run off everyone who isn't an addict. That's fair. So there's just nothing they can do at that point. Right. And those folks are the most addicted. So getting them to come to Threads and post at the same rate requires that feedback loop. And Threads does not have enough people yet.

27:20And that's the chicken and egg problem. And again, I think the moments for Threads are going to look like NFL season when a lot of people start tweeting the NBA finals. award season, like all the live events that Twitter used to capture more presidential debates, election season, all of those moments are moments for this particular kind of social, like these are not TikTok moments. No one's watching the debate and like opening TikTok to get live reactions. Like you are a psychopath if you're doing that. I tried doing it last night. I feel like a psychopath. Like this is crazy because it's not there yet.

27:56And like, it's too fast. Like these are live vlogs, right? That's kind of what you want out of this. We make a lot to live vlogs like that's how i how i've always thought about this and threads isn't quite ready for that yet especially with its bizarre insistence on the algorithmic feed and then twitter isn't either this is the moment threads kind of has to figure out what it wants to be right because like most area that whole team have been saying all along they don't want to be a place for politics and a place for news and it's like do you know how you become twitter is by being a place for politics and a place for news like you can't have it both ways the only things that get people that excited are politics and news and like i'm defining news broadly as just like things that are happening in real time right like the weather is news and that includes sports like sports is news in a very real way right like it's it is a thing that is happening right now that we all are talking about like that's what it is and for them to say this is a place for text but that isn't designed to be this kind of like real time up to the moment thing.

28:56I'm just not sure I know what that is. And so it does feel like it's going to be interesting to see what it looks like on a football Sunday, because that's a relatively sort of low stakes and unproblematic version of this problem. But this question of like, how do you stay that fast? How do you surface stuff like this in real time? As somebody is tweeting 100 times during or somebody is posting 100 times during a single game, what is the Threads algorithm going to make of that? And how is like the open question for me about what the next, you know, six months are going to look like. And I just have no idea.

29:30I'll give you one very specific example. I have tweeted in my life during any number of Packers games, just the words, oh no. Mostly in relation to Mike McCarthy, but just in general, oh no, right? Like in Twitter was very good. It's somehow finding the people who understood what I was saying, that it was there was a football game going on. I had been tweeting about it. Here's this like totally context free. Oh, no. In the middle of a Sunday. And everyone kind of understood what was going on. That is kind of magic. Right. That felt like a hive mind moment. Yeah. Like you're in a community. You're all just sort of like chatting in this weird way.

30:09Instagram threads right now takes that. Oh, no. And like seven hours later, delivers it next to like a John Cena tweet. Like that makes no sense. what is going on there and that is classic facebook yeah and that yes and they they want to get away from context collapse and it actually turns out that the chronological feed provides all the context and so like i think they have to make some big decisions especially if they want i get why they're saying they don't want politics and news like one they all personally have bad experiences with that adam missari ran the facebook news feed he has a bad experience with politics news i get it second in canada and australia and all these other places the governments are saying you might have to pay for links to news sites.

30:50They got to solve that problem. They're not launched in the EU, which is going to have its own weird rules. So I get why they're like, you know what? This isn't, we're not headed straight forward. We're going to start with like fashion, Instagram stuff, but they're just going to quickly arrive at void when it's Biden and probably Trump in a debate. If you are competitive at all with Twitter, you need that experience to happen on your platform and not Twitter. Otherwise you're just not going to have the volume. We're not going to have the interest. and you're certainly not going to have the impact, which is what we have talked about in the show several times now.

31:19Meta runs gigantic platforms that make more money than their rivals, but often have no cultural impact. And I think this platform lives and dies on its impact. And we really like, so let's see, Threads launched at the beginning of July, right? And we really haven't had a sort of everybody on the internet moment since then, right? Like there just hasn't been a thing that all of a sudden, out of nowhere, everyone was talking about. Has there been one? I can't like I can't think of. There was a viral NFT post that went around and that was the most. And I think that alone tells you. Richard's talking about viral NFT posts.

31:56I'm shutting this down. Oh, come on. You need to buy Bordia Club. I'll stop. This is not investment advice. The first cast is not investment advice. It is because right now you're buying low. There's nowhere else to go. All right. There has been one. I'm saying last night the debate should have been one and it wasn't one. Yeah, but we're about to get 18 months of moments where people people care about are going to have to choose which platform they spend their day hammering away on. And like the fight is coming in a really real way. And I wonder if threads like even infrastructurally is ready for it.

32:36I think the web thing is a big deal, but there's still like you guys have been saying a lot of work left to do. All right. Everyone, we're going to take a break. Everyone check on your NFT wallets. See if Richard is stolen from you. Richard will buy your board apes. He told me that right before we started recording. Click any link I send you. It's fine. All right. Please don't click links from Richard. We'll be right back.

33:02Support for this show comes from Shopify. One of the most exciting parts of starting a business is when the sales start coming in. If your business is looking to start selling online, Shopify has everything you need to create your online store. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10 % of all e-commerce in the U.S., from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started. With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand's style. And Shopify is packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography.

33:41And best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing, returns, and beyond. Turn those dreams in two and give them the best shot at success with Shopify. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash vergecast. Go to shopify.com slash vergecast. Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs.

34:27When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote. Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best.

34:59Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

35:27All right, we're back. Like I said, a lot of little news this week. Do you want to start with the PlayStation portal? Do you want to start with all the streaming stuff? Let's do the portal. This is the thing I am most flummoxed by. And Richard, as the gamer of the three of us, I would say, I'm curious to know, A, you should probably explain what this thing is, because I think it's actually harder to explain than it seems like it should be. But then I want you to convince me that this is actually a thing that needs to exist in the world because I'm not sure. I will do that, but I'll start by apologizing because it's basically my fault that everything Sony announced this week exists.

36:02And I'll explain. I'm sorry, I did this to the world. I will have to repay them somehow, perhaps in tokens that you could invest in on my blockchain. Click everything Richard sends you. So they have introduced the PlayStation portal. This is something, you know, they kind of hinted at it. They said that it was coming earlier this year. It is a screen in the middle of a DualSense controller. That's it. It plays PS5 games over Wi-Fi from your PS5. You can't really do anything else. It's$200. You cannot connect Bluetooth headphones to it. If you want to use some wireless headphones with it, you need to buy some of their new audio gear.

36:40They have$200 wireless earbuds. I just want to underline that means they cost as much as the PlayStation Portal. Yeah. Your full kitted out price for a Portal and headphones is$400. because it doesn't have Bluetooth. At least, you know,$350 if you want the cheaper, crappier headphones. But it's, I want to come back to PlayStation Link because I think it is preposterous. I just wanted to underline that price. Yes. The reason why you can't just use your regular headphones or perhaps Sony's other headphones that they've introduced, they just released the new XM5 earbuds not that long ago. They don't have the PlayStation Link audio technology that lets you get lossless audio and low latency audio, which of course is important for gaming.

37:26But I think people use Bluetooth headphones with their Steam decks and whatnot. Yeah, you compare Bluetooth headphones to a Switch. It's fine. Yeah. But yeah, Sony has said, no, you will use our headphones, these specific PlayStation headphones, or you won't use anything at all, I guess. But the reason why this is my fault is I take a look at my desk, at the table that I have sitting next to my couch in my living room, and there's a lot of gamer headsets on there. that costs way too much money, and I've just bought too many of them. How many does one person need? More.

38:03Welcome to the Vergeast, everybody. Like, there's always another one. There's always a new feature. There's always something else. You know what? I think the reason why I lost that match is because my headset wasn't good enough. Oh, yeah. Which, it's logical. It makes sense. If you'd been able to hear them sneaking up on you in spatial audio, you would have gotten, I got you. I understand. Can I say the most old man thing about gameware headsets? Yeah. So I mostly only play on-the-end games with my actual friends, and we have all discovered that it's easier to make speakerphone calls on our phones than to fuck with headsets.

38:35So I just have my phone with FaceTime audio on a conference call, just like on the coffee table. It works so much better than gameware headsets. But that's only because you guys can't figure out Discord. Yeah, that's true. I was just going to say, you just described the whole origin story of Discord. I'm just saying. Which is a bunch of nerds on team speak and conference calls trying to make this stuff work. Like I'm saying, if I can avoid software in my life, I'd do it. And that's my software. Anyway, continue, Richard, with your headphone purchasing odyssey. Yes. I convinced Sony that this was a good idea because they saw how many headsets I bought and they said, we can sell headsets to idiots all day.

39:11This is just money that we're missing. We need to have more audio gear for gamers. The other part is they introduced this handheld. Why is this my fault? Do you know how many switches I've purchased? A lot of them. An almost untold number. I do not play the Nintendo Switch. Why do you have one? I bought them for other people. My wife has two. I bought her one, then I bought a Switch OLED, and I thought that I would get one of them, but it turns out that she has two Nintendo Switches now. That's cool. And I think there are a lot of people like that, where they have multiple ones. They have one for this room, they have one for that room, they have one to take on the go.

39:43And that's what Sony is chasing with this device, I think, is that you've got a PlayStation, and you want to play it in another room, and you don't have a briefcase TV because you didn't buy the$2 ,000 briefcase TV. So what are you going to do? Are you just going to play games on your iPad like a normal? It makes sense for lots of families, right? You got a PS5 downstairs. You might have it connected to the big TV, speakers, whatever. That is like you don't want another PS5 and TV rig upstairs. Moving the games back and forth sucks. Here's this thing. You can just go play it in your bedroom. You can just give one to your teenager.

40:15You can play in the bedroom. That seems to make a lot of sense. does it allow you to simultaneously play on the ps5 and remotely i don't think so i don't i don't think it works like that yeah that seems i mean that's the miss yeah so this is my thing with this device is like the one use case i agree makes sense right like there are times i want to play games sitting in bed or on the couch like my playstation is hooked up to the same monitor that i'm on right now on my computer and there are other times i want to play games elsewhere Moving my PlayStation is annoying. Completely get that. There are so many other things this thing could have done.

40:52Sony has game streaming that it could have done on the portal. Sony has some really cool old systems through which you can emulate old PlayStation games that it could have done on the portal. Sony could have done so many things that would have made this device cooler and better. It could have had streaming apps so you can watch movies and things when someone else is on your PlayStation. there's just a million ways it could have gone and it picked none of them except like the minimum viable least thing this device could possibly be and that just kind of drives me nuts yeah they picked the things that didn't require a processor right i mean that's like kind of what it feels like they made it as cheap as possible but limiting the amount of local processing that is happening here and saying all of that's going to happen on your ps5 i will say the the only case in which that argument holds is if the battery life is as good as supposedly it might be and i think sony said to cnet i think that the plan is to have the battery last as long as the dual sense controller which is like eight or nine hours that's pretty good if i can sit there and play games on it for eight hours on a charge like that's legit it's still not enough i still i would trade two hours of that battery life for more things to do but it's something yeah i would I'll also point out, right, in one of the use cases here, what are you doing?

42:09You're on a trip. You're in a hotel room. You want to play your PS5 at home. Your hotel has reasonably good Wi-Fi. You need, what, 15 megabits? That's sort of the recommended speed. You can get that in a lot of hotels nowadays. Great. You're playing. You know what you can also do is just bring a DualSense controller along and open the app on your iPad. And it's maybe not as seamless, but it also just, like, I have friends who just, like, do this all the time. Yeah, it works. Like it really, it's a totally valid gaming system. Like that's what I do right now in my house. And I have always thought that like some, when they first announced this as the Project Q, I was like, okay, add a Switch-y thing to my PlayStation rig and I'm golden.

42:51This solves all my problems. This now just is like a slightly less wonky version of the system I already have. No, they didn't build a Switch. They built the Wii U, which was not popular. So that's not a great sign. But I think the thing that happens from Sony's perspective is that, yeah, sure, you could just hook up your DualSense to an iPad and play that way. But then you wouldn't pay Sony$200, which makes it less good for them. And they don't want to do more cloud streaming or anything because that would encourage you to buy fewer PS5s. And they don't want to do that either. It's true. You can also just do what I do, which is I bought a second power cable and a second HDMI cord, and I set them up in the sunroom where there's a projector, and I just move my PS5 around.

43:39And literally the only inconvenience of that is I have to remember to turn it off all the way. It will scream at you if you do not do that. Oh, it does that awful bit. It doesn't like it. No. But yeah, I move my PS5 from the basement to the outside to play Madden on the projector all the time. It's fine. Yeah, that's smart. That's what my Series S is for. It's when I want to play Xbox somewhere else. Yeah. I got it. I love how Richard has just multiples of every console. There's an Excel spreadsheet at both Microsoft and Sony. It's just labeled like Lawler margins. No, you can pretty much predict what products people are going to come out by what I have six of.

44:17Because they're going to release more of those very soon. I think the other thing is that this signals that there's going to be another PS5 pretty soon. We saw that shell leak of the slim, thick, whatever it is. The slim, thick. If you look at it, you can see that they've released this audio gear that doesn't work with the PS5 without a USB dongle, which, you know, we love the dongles. They don't. They're going to need to release a system with that. They're going to do something. So we'll maybe have more clarity early next year, mid next year, when we get another PS5 and see how it all works together.

44:46This means we now have to talk about PlayStation Link. This is ridiculous that it doesn't have Bluetooth. It's ridiculous that these headphones are so expensive, don't work with the existing PS5. And Sony's claim is, what, just lower latency? Yeah, that's about it. Something, something higher audio quality, too. And they claim it's easier to switch between devices, which is funny because one of the things that Sony's headphones are notoriously not great at is switching between devices. so I don't know that I have a ton of faith in that which is a thing you can do over bluetooth and Sony does poorly but yeah in theory there are like they have a list of reasons and I don't find a single one of them compelling and I think PlayStation link as a thing is just like totally outrageous I mean this is a sort of thing and uh Marques Brownlee made a video about this this is the sort of thing that if Apple did it with the iPhone like I would lose my mind like I accused Apple of wanting to do this when they released the AirPods and they took the iPhone jack off the iPhone, right?

45:44Like we're going to get everyone used to wireless audio. Then we're going to build a proprietary wireless audio protocol and you can only use our headphones. And this is true in phones like all over the place. And I will say a not small portion of that Apple has done. Right. And so is Google. And so is Samsung. Yeah. Everyone's phones now they've all taken the headphone jacks away and they have Bluetooth and then they have Bluetooth plus proprietary extensions that only their headphones can use. So the AirPods, obviously bunch of features, only AirPods can access on an iPhone. If you have a Samsung phone, there's a bunch of features that Samsung buds can do.

46:19If you have a Pixel, the Pixel buds have custom extensions. That's all shitty over there. But the reality is like, most of those features aren't very good. Like, oh no, spatial audio, like whatever. Also, I don't necessarily hate that as a thing. Like to say we support the standards, right? Like it's what Apple does with iMessage too. They're like, if you want to send SMSs, that's fine, we'll support it, it works. but if you want to exist in our system everything is better and like do i wish the world was not that way yes but like that's how it is and that's roughly fine as long as you're in a position where you can still fail sort of gracefully this is like if apple had just said no more sms's ever well so the the the playstation portal does have a 3.5 millimeter headphone track which presumably has low latency it's it's just it's we it doesn't have the middle thing right it doesn't have bluetooth so if you wanted to you could get one of those like airpods bluetooth dongles that you use on an airplane seat back and plug that into your playstation portal and then pair your ones to that i you know we're gonna make sean hollister make that video one day i can see it coming like a train in the night but it is like it's weird that you would build wireless radios that support your proprietary thing you would have a headphone jack and then not the most common thing but it isn't weird.

47:40It's the most classic Sony thing ever, making a weird proprietary thing that doesn't work with anyone else's stuff. The problem that you point out is that it doesn't work with their own headphones. I have a bunch of XM headphones here and none of them have it. Why is that? You get the feeling, I love talking about it in order short, you get the feeling that when people walk into the Sony office, it's a little bit like Memento. They're just constantly introducing themselves to each other. Like, oh, you work on headphones? I didn't know we did headphones here what do you think headphones it's like no one knows who the boom uh speaker guy is yeah they're like oh we do we do playstations we should maybe the one party speaker guy is just in the back just jamming the whole time he's like super bass you know like the mega bass team is like what the fuck you know like that's just sony all the time true well and the playstation team seems to be especially that way like the playstation team seems to uh not have to play by any of the other Sony rules and just kind of does whatever it wants at all times.

48:41Yeah. The Memento comparison, I think, is a little dark. It's more like Dory in Finding Nemo. Every time it turns around, it's like, who are you? I don't think everyone at Sony is heavily tattooed and trying to solve a murder. That would, I think, give them a little more purpose. This is much more like, hello, who are you? You seem nice, yeah. That was the Phil Harrison Sony. That was a few generations ago. There's actually a lot of other gaming stuff going on. And Qualcomm has sort of a portable device. We've described it as a Batarang. The Quest 3, which we're expecting to see at Meta Kinect, is leaked out.

49:13People are unboxing it. There's a new Atari 2600, which is very good. Samsung TVs are getting cloud gaming. There's kind of a lot going on. I think the Qualcomm thing to me is the most exciting, which is basically like Qualcomm is making a big bet on handheld gaming as a thing. And this is kind of what Qualcomm does, right? They sort of look around and they say, OK, we really only know how to make one thing. what other industry can we make it for and they've like they've done this with cars they got really into wearables they got super into headphones for a while and now the thing that they're trying to figure out is how to do like custom chips for gaming handhelds and so they they came out with three different like tiers of chips there's the g1 the g2 and the g3x gen 2 which basically ladder all the way up from like as far as i can tell basically like a phone level thing to like a steam deck level thing and i just think that's awesome like the there are lots of problems with this starting with the fact that they run android and there aren't that many good games for android the game gaming ecosystem is not that great but game streaming is going to help solve some of that problem and so like the idea that we might be about to get a run of different versions of these devices because they're going to get easier and cheaper to make and source parts for i think is super exciting i don't know that i love the idea that they should all look like a screen in the middle with two halves of a controller on either side but that seems to be where we're aligning as a world on what these things are supposed to look like but i don't know richard are you gonna end up buying 15 different versions of handheld gaming consoles like i'm excited about this thing i'm not 100 sure why all the time but i am excited about it no uh they predict that you'll go outside that you'll use in places and i don't touch grass so no not not gonna do it listen if you use all your nintendo switches indoors you can use these indoors also but i I don't play the Nintendo Switch.

50:59Oh, yeah. All right. Fair enough. Let's get your wife on here. What does she think? Okay. She might have a few. All right. So we have long asked for emails from people who buy Android phones to play games. Pro gaming phones. The potential customers of the Razer Edge or this Qualcomm thing. I'm just looking. I just searched the Red Casting box for Android gaming. This one is spam. This leaves us with six emails, one of which is not about gaming at all on Android. but I'll just read some. This one starts out with, I do not own an Android gaming phone. So you can see what this call for reader feedback is like.

51:38But they own an Android gaming handheld called the Pimax Portal. I bought it specifically for one game, Genshin Impact, so I could play it on the go. I wanted to be able to play it with a controller, which is not supported on Android, but does on iOS. It works okay, but you can get controllers to press the virtual buttons. So that's, this is like, this is why people buy Android gaming devices. I want to play one game that supports controllers on one platform and not another, and this thing, let me do it. This person actually bought a Razer Edge. This is a quote. There are a few games optimized for controllers on Android, and most are pretty good.

52:08I use the Edge to emulate games. I definitely own another form. There's definitely emulators up to PS2, 3DS, and Switch. And then this is a very important line. I'm one of the people who have more fun getting something to work than actually having the thing, which is after my own heart. I am absolutely that person. These are our people. And then he finishes with, this explains where the next thing I bought was an ROG ally. Fair. Emulators are not a small piece of this, though. I think the deeper I get into this world, the more I realize there is a vast ecosystem of weird ways to play games that are at least 20 years old all over Android especially.

52:51And I think that's very cool. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, we're due for what happened with Android tablets, right? Like everybody's going to beg Google to care about this and push things along and make them try new things. And then Google will be like, we think Android gaming is the future. And then eight years from now, we'll be somewhere. Yeah. We got one last one. This person likes to play free-to-play games on their phone. He says, I've had legitimately rewarding gaming experiences on mobile, especially puzzle games like Very Little Nightmares. We're Shadows Somewhere in Monument Valley. And then they finish by saying, I live in Minnesota, and anyone who says water is a good windshield fluid is a monster.

53:25which is an important callback to our other reader feedback. But I just want to point this out. Like we have been asking on the show, if you are a hardcore Android gamer, let us know. And this is a pretty good gestalt of what the responses have been like. I'm a big nerd and I like to tinker, which again, you were listening to the right podcast. We love you here. I want to play one game and solve one problem and Android helps me solve that problem very directly. That is just straight Android stuff. Like iOS is not like we want to help you solve a problem that you've made up. iOS is like, welcome to our world, right?

54:00Like we've issued you a blazer. Android's like whatever you want. And so like that makes sense. And then the third one is like I'm able to do things over here with emulators. I wasn't able to do something else. That all makes sense. Yeah. But there's not the, I don't think there's a culture of, like with gaming PCs, right? There's a gaming PC culture. The Razor Edge does not have that kind of culture around it. I think the Steam Deck is getting there, but that feels like a whole different kind of thing. Well, there has to be two sides to it because you have to have the culture and you also have to have the working business model.

54:29And the problem for Android gaming is that you don't really have a business model that makes someone make a great game for Android. So the best game that you can play on your Android gaming device is a 15-year-old PlayStation game. Yeah. Which is fun. Great for you if you have one. It's just not like there's no business in that. Well, they're about to release all the remasters, the Metal Gear games. and boy are they going to get that money from me again. They're super going to get that money from me again. Let's end by switching gears a little bit. We've talked about football season a bunch already in the show.

55:00It's coming. So it's just a couple weeks away here. And the tech platforms that are invested in football are starting to do stuff. So NFL Sunday Ticket obviously is a big YouTube deal. They're doing pricing promotions for college students, which is a Sunday Ticket mainstay. Lying to the NFL about where you live to get cheaper Sunday Ticket, I think a cultural phenomenon underreported, but you can do it. And it's getting more integrated into the Google TV home screen. And then Amazon is like, you know, we had the CEO of AWS on Decoder a couple weeks ago. And he was like, we advertise in the NFL because it shows off the capabilities.

55:36And the decision makers of big companies like know who we are, which is I always wonder, like, if you're in the market for AWS, why do you need to know about it? How do you not know about it? the ibm super bowl ad and it turns out like a lot of people don't know about it and like next gen stats powered by aws makes it easier for people to go to their boss and say we would like to work with aws incredible incredible that that is still the case in 2023 um but they are rolling out an awful lot of additional next gen stats on thursday night football yeah i spent uh some time earlier this week with some of the folks working on this stuff and it's super interesting to hear them talk about it because like we're all football fans and the thing that we know as football fans is that uh if you in any way mess with football people freak out yep like anything where like if you if you move the camera angle that it's at when they snap the ball people freak out oh yeah the scoreboard display yeah exactly like if it was if it's up here versus down at the bottom of the screen people have really strong opinions like it's it's that stuff matters to people and if there is one media property on the planet that you don't mess with in general for lots of reasons right now it's the nfl but now amazon like they did thursday night football last year it went pretty well they didn't have any like huge disastrous errors ryan fitzpatrick wore like a lot of weird shirts during the halftime shows but like it was fine and so this year amazon is like okay we have some confidence and we we know we can do this the numbers were pretty big last year they weren't as big as linear tv numbers have typically been for thursday night football but they were bigger than everybody expected for streaming and so they're like okay what wild new stuff can we do and they've invented some genuinely cool stuff we'll see if it works in actual you know live games but in the stuff they've been testing like they have a thing they call it defensive alerts where uh it'll actually on screen in real time flag players that things are likely to blitz uh and the idea is it essentially teaches the viewer how to read the field like a quarterback does so you see a player's uh body language or how they move before the snap or what they're saying to each other and it'll actually register like this player is likely to blitz keep an eye on them so it's like it's a cool way to watch but also invites you like into the strategy of the game.

57:57And again, I suspect we're going to see this go really haywire a lot of ways in the way that all of these large language model systems go haywire, which is going to be deeply hilarious. But it's a cool idea. And as like a kind of stat nerd on top of just liking watching football, it's going to be super fun. I'm kind of into it. But the danger is that you build Foxtracks, which we all which we remember for the wrong reasons, which is how much people hated it. First of all, they were right. The puck is hard to see on TV, or at least it was back before high definition. No, it was the right thing.

58:28Yeah. Fox should have stuck that out. Maybe not the right application, but they were correct. They identified the problem and they dealt with it, helping you follow the puck around during NHL games. But as you said, messing with football. People have been watching football their whole lot. They know how to watch football. They've decided how they want to watch football. Again, I do not watch the Lions anymore because I like to have happy Sundays filled with joy and mirth. But if I did watch the Lions - Just wandering the streets going to bar after bar. And my TV told me which blitzer the Lions quarterback is not seeing coming.

58:59Because of course he isn't. Because he plays for the Lions. So he sucks. He's not going to make the correct read. Every single time. I would stop watching Lions games again. So I don't know. This might not work. So what you're saying is knowledge is rage in this case. But here's what I'll say. Amazon, last season with Thursday Night Football, Amazon had the worst games in NFL history. Like, yeah, some of the worst games I have ever seen. And like, maybe that's luck and maybe that's scheduling. Who knows? They were all like uniform, like the broadcasters were like, what are we doing? Al Michaels was like, I'm audibly opening his flask, just trying to get through it.

59:41You can hear them like swiping on FanDuel themselves, like looking for prop bets to talk about. And so maybe all this stuff just makes that stuff slightly more interesting to watch if you're not betting on the outcome of the game, which is currently why people watch NFL games to the end. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing that was not in Amazon's plans that I expected were fantasy or gambling. Because, I mean, that's the two places everybody is going, right? Like you watch football either because you have a fantasy team or you have bets on it. And ESPN is now into betting, which we've talked about.

1:00:15Like that is where all of this is headed and it's where all the money is. And Amazon, it's a long deal. It has like 10 more years of Thursday night football to do. I suspect we'll get there, but none of that yet. 10 more years of bottom of the barrel teams kind of not scoring any points. Oh, and wait, before, before we go, we should take a break and stop talking about football, but the, it's not in 4k. And I mentioned twice in the story that I wrote about it, that it's not in 4k, which was just little tiny nods to Neelai Patel. each time. They failed. How angry are you that it's not in 4K? So they are all doing this thing where they all promise that they've invested in 4K delivery.

1:00:54So like the cameras are 4K now. The cameras are actually high resolution because they like being able to punch in. And they're like HDR. Which is why they, like the twice a game, they show that thing where you get like the tons of bokeh on the shot and everybody's like, this is amazing. It's like, yeah, they could do that the whole game. It'd be amazing. No, so those ones, that's actually, that's something different. That shot, they've started using basically prosumer level dslrs and this was like a whole invention like oh my god like nfl broadcast teams are using sony a7r2s like great and and people got lost their minds and thought it was aka and we all had to be like no those are sony a7s like that's every youtuber has this camera fair enough but they're already shooting at higher resolution because they like to be able to zoom right um and they shoot those pretty crisply so they've built these like 4k hdr workflows And then to go out to all of their additional partners who are not 4K enabled, they bring it down to 1080p.

1:01:46And then, you know, your Fox, you then re-upscale it to 4K at delivery, which is insanity. Right? It's like, it's so frustrating. And they have all landed on this line that says, we're going to do HDR because people, that's what people can see. And I'm like, you are nuts. like what people can see is more detail if you're like look at how much brighter it is i i believe you right people are every year marquez does the photo comparison uh bracket and every year the brightest photos win regardless of quality like i believe you that people can see brighter stuff but in the context of an nfl football game there is actually so little dynamic variation because the whole field is awash in lights there are no dark parts of an nfl football game they do that on purpose it's like yeah they're they're trying very hard to make everything bright regardless even in the the like promo material that amazon has for this the thing that is the most different between sdr and hdr is the sky yeah and it's like fine like how many for the four establishing shots that they do every game of like the city that they're in it'll look great but i don't know what this gets me for football yeah it's just it's it's bananas to me especially because amazon owns it end to end right it's their broadcast their distribution their app they should be they should at least be able to do it and they they still haven't fox still hasn't done it it's been years now since we've been dunking on fox we're not doing it cbs god bless them they were at least they're at 1080p where Fox is at 720 and ESPN is at 720 like that's horrible but they've all adopted this middle ground of HD HDR instead of QHD HDR which is crazy it's like horrible like just stop it like it's especially galling because everywhere else in the world like the Premier League is in just full like you just get it in true 4k across England you know who has the Premier league in england is it amazon prime video is it amazon prime video it is amazon prime i thought nbc had it it's a it's a mix but amazon streams it of course right and it's in true 4k in japan every year that the olympics come out and nhk in japan is like we're doing a test a first ever test and last year it was like a first ever test of native over the air 8k broadcast which just worked and like next year like 24k native over the air broadcast and we're here with 1080 phd This is why David didn't bring it up, and I'm going to stop now.

1:04:20What are they doing? These are the most lucrative sports rights in America. Just do it. Neil Mohan, if you're listening to me, man who runs YouTube, I've sent him this email. Why won't YouTube just pay to do this in 4K? I will pay them more money. And he was like, that's a good idea. That's as far as I've gotten. I'm doing the Lord's work. That's a good idea. We're the Detroit Lions of resolution. Richard, the Lions are good now. I'm totally over it. It's fine. They haven't hurt me. We'll talk about that while we're at break. Fly hard. We'll take a break. We'll be right back.

1:05:17That helps you turn ideas into something real fast. Figma Make is a different kind of vibe coding tool. With just a few prompts, you can turn any idea into a code-backed prototype or app that anyone can explore, iterate on, and share. And it's all connected to Figma. So you can start from scratch or from your design file. Figma Make is made for designers, product managers, and builders who want to move fast and explore more ideas. Try it now and see how quickly you can make your ideas real with Figma Make. Just go to Figma.com slash Vergecast. That's F-I-G-M-A dot com slash Vergecast. Support for the show comes from Udacity.

1:06:01AI seems to be everywhere these days, and if you want to prepare yourself to be able to use it, Udacity says they can help, no matter what field you're in. Udacity is an online learning platform with courses in AI and tech, including generative AI, Gentic AI, Python, data science, and much more. When you learn with Udacity, you're not just passively watching videos or reading articles. You're doing practical exercises and projects that prepare you for the job you want. That's why 90 % of Udacity graduates surveyed say that they achieved their enrollment goal. Udacity just launched a master's degree in AI.

1:06:37You heard that right. And when you have a certification from Udacity, recruiters and employers take notice. So for a better job, better salary, and better skills, you can check out Udacity today. The tech field is always evolving, and you should too. You could try Udacity risk-free for seven days. You can head to udacity.com slash verge and use code verge for 40 % off your order. Once again, that's Udacity.com backslash Verge for 40 % off and make sure you use the promo code Verge so they know we sent you.

1:07:17All right, we're back. Is this a lightning round? Is that what this is going to be? We're already over. Yeah. We're going to do this one fast because you specifically, Neelai, look at me. The thing you picked for the lightning round. this was assigned to me i that's true i picked it for you because you wrote about it for the website i feel the urge to like set a timer that like lights your house on fire after several minutes all right i'll just do this okay so so you might remember our friend ai drake can we get a little laser bong it's a laser bong it's a bomb there are lasers ai drake is an existential threat to the music labels, to YouTube, to everyone, because you cannot copyright a voice.

1:08:01Can't do it. And if you want to do likenesses and publicity, that's state law. There's no federal law. So Google this week announced a deal with Universal Music Group, which represents Drake and The Weeknd, saying we're going to figure out some sort of something, something or the other. We're going to have a working group called the YouTube AI Music Console. Frank Sinatra's children will be in it. Ryan Tedder from OneRepublic, he can always be drafted into making consequential music. It's going to be fine. So they have a council, like figure out some AI stuff that's good. And then this line, we will figure out how to expand content ID to cover generated music.

1:08:42YouTube content ID is not a perfect system. It is necessary for YouTube to exist. So YouTube in the early days, right, full of like South Park clips that were unlicensed Viacom sues YouTube. This is existential. YouTube full of pirated music or music without licenses. Parents are uploading videos of their kids dancing to Prince. You can't sue YouTube section 230. So that label sue the parents for posting videos of their kids dancing to Prince. This is a real case. I went to the appellate courts in this country for that to be ruled fair use banana situation. So YouTube over many years has built the system called content ID, which I promise you most kids in this country think is the law.

1:09:24law, this like automated content identification system that only operates on YouTube. Like whenever you see YouTubers thinking about copyright law, they are not actually thinking about copyright law. They're thinking about YouTube system that it built to enable itself to exist in the face of existential copyright threats, which is not a crazy assertion. I mean, for all intents and purposes, it is the law. Like, yeah, it's the, it's the thing that it's the enforcement mechanism of the platform that pays a lot of people their money. Sure. It is close to the law. And it has a relationship to the law, which is really important, right?

1:09:56If you are ever in the middle of a content ID dispute, if you make a piece of film criticism, we were talking about this last week, if you make a piece of film criticism and it gets flagged by content ID and a studio gets a hold of it and they say, take this down, it's not fair use, YouTube doesn't step in to say, no, we think it is. YouTube says, well, you guys talk to each other. And then after a minute of that, it says, well, you should go to court. And let us know how it goes. Basically, like, let us know how it goes. Like, whatever. Because it has the whole legal system to fall back on. Because fair use for that kind of stuff is, like, well within the law.

1:10:30What they're going to do with universal music, I promise you this will happen, is one, next year at Google I.O., we'll get a video of Ryan Tedder being like, make me some beats. And then, like, Google Bard making a beat. And Ryan will be like, this is great for creativity. That video is coming. 100 % coming. and then next to it, content ID will be expanded so that if you are using the AI-generated voice of Drake in a song, Universal Music Group can push a button and take that video down or monetize it for themselves. I guarantee you, this is where they're going. That second point, I think, is the one, right?

1:11:05Because what Universal is going to say is like, we don't want to pick this fight. We just want to make the money off of it, right? Like if Universal and the other labels can play this correctly, it's all upside. like they've just infinitely scaled the amount of drake music there can be in the world and they'll get paid for all of it right like maybe so we don't know what the rates are going to be right they just they've just said it enough to suggest this is what they're going to do they haven't done it yet we don't know the details but you know they put out blog posts one was neil mohan and the other one's lucy and grange the ceo of universal and they put out like paired blog posts on the youtube blog and they all sound very proud of themselves you can just see that this is what they're after right if you train a bunch of ais on drake and then it can wrap like drake universal's like you should pay us and i i think a lot of people say okay common sense that makes sense the flip side of that is that is not anywhere in the law so if you get that notice from youtube that says constant id has flagged fake drake we flagged laser bong take it down or blah blah and you're like no i disagree and they're like go to court and you show up in a court and And the courts seem like, what the hell are you talking about?

1:12:12It's like that out doesn't exist. So then YouTube has to make decisions. And it's going to be like you, Drake, Universal Music Group, and YouTube. And I just feel like I know who's definitely going to lose. I don't know who's going to win. But I know who loses in that situation. I also know that Content ID notoriously overzealous, right? It's too protective of copyright material on YouTube. YouTubers know this. Our own audience, we got some emails last week after we talked about it. they know that the YouTubers are all trying to dance around it to just do film criticism. What happens when it's just a kid trying to rap like Drake?

1:12:46No AI, just an impersonator of Drake. Do they get taken down? Like, there's no law that distinguishes that. There's no AI system that can reliably, at 100 % success rate, distinguish between AI, Drake, and a kid who just is really good at sounding like Drake. Who's going to lose that one? I don't know the answers to this, But I do know that in order to keep YouTube going and in particular competitive with TikTok, which has huge influence for the music industry, Google has to like invent some kind of additional licensing scheme for the labels. The labels are going to get paid for this or they're going to take their music away.

1:13:21And Google can't have that. Right. Yeah. It's I mean, I was trying to think about this after you wrote this story and the number of industries out there that have this kind of leverage over YouTube, I think it's just one. It's just music. Like if if if the movie industry decided it hated YouTube, that would be bad, but not like crush the creator economy bad. but if you suddenly lose access to music for creators to do stuff in shorts like there goes shorts it's done kill that dances on shorts it's all done youtube music goes away a huge percentage of youtube's views are music videos like there's literally the mr beast just set a record for the most views in 24 hours for a non-music video like that is a that is that is how big music videos are and i think it's pretty clear that the music industry knows yeah it is this powerful over youtube they definitely know and so you can just see what youtube is forced to do a couple of blog posts saying we're all friends here's the ai council we're gonna build some tools together ryan tedder get in here you know just do some right you'll you'll do anything for money what do you what do you think it's ryan tedder i just don't like wonderful are you just like mad that he's wrote so many good songs is that what it is is it is that is that how you describe them someone today described the new addison ray record to me is like the return of the kia commercial music it's just like that's where we are in music history the hamsters yeah that's it's it sounds like royalty-free car commercial music like a lot of music sounds like royalty-free car commercial music right yeah and it's all because ryan tedder invented it so you're welcome he's he's an innovator.

1:15:02He's right up there with slash. Exactly. Eddie Van Halen slash Ryan Teter. That's the pantheon of rock music. Anyhow, but you can see what they're doing with the music industry, right? They're making nice. They're going to find ways to work together and they're going to invent a revenue stream for them. The flip side of that with Google in particular is Google is looking at the whole web. No one has leverage over Google when it comes to the web. and they're saying, oh, this is ours now. And so if you allow Google search crawlers to look at your website, you are training Bard and you are training the search generative experience.

1:15:37And there's fundamentally zero difference between I'm gonna hoover up all the songs in the world to make a Frank Sinatra AI and I'm gonna hoover up all of the articles about bikes to make the search generative experience answer questions about bikes. It's the same thing. and Google on the one hand is saying, okay, these, this partner is important. So we got to build custom copyright private law on YouTube for them so they can get some money and be happy. And then to the entire rest of the internet, they're saying, if you want search traffic, we're taking your shit. And I, I like, you just want, you're watching this play out in like absolutely bananas ways.

1:16:17And I think they're going to come around to signing some deals. I think open AI is going going to come around to signing some deals. Google has some kind of deal with the New York Times. They won't talk about the terms. OpenAI has some kind of deal with the AP. They won't really talk about the terms. But you can just see their choices are either a decade of fair use litigation. Some of these cases are already going from Sarah Silverman and others. Or we're going to pay the biggest and richest players to participate in our experiences and compete that way. And all of that just feels like, oh, we're just kind of getting back to AOL, right?

1:16:51Where like AOL had a bunch of media partners and you would like get AOL in there. And then there were like some forums that you could like also go to, or like you could dump out to the internet, you know, through AOL, but like really like AOL's media partners were the thing. And it just seems like that's where everyone is going because to solve the AI training copyright problem, you're either betting on a decade of litigation with our current court system. I'm going to make a multi-billion dollar bet on how Clarence Thomas feels in five years. wolf or you can pay a bunch of money to the new york times and i'm just watching this play out and it's like oh this is all kind of icky like it's important to take a step back and just be like this is what's happening like copyright law is so broken and weird that on the one hand the estate of frank sinatra gets paid whenever there's a frank sinatra impersonator on youtube weird and on the other hand most websites have to give all their shit to google for free or basically commit suicide by not getting any search traffic.

1:17:50Weird. And either way, anybody who doesn't have the sway to pick and win that fight gets hosed. Like if you're an independent artist, Google's not signing that deal with you for YouTube and isn't signing that deal with you for SGE. And you just have to bank on the fact that what it supposedly delivers you is worth it. But anyway, Neal, you went about six times longer than you were supposed to on that one. I can keep going. No, listen, if this were banana surgery, I would say you can have as long as you want. The whole hour next week is banana surgery. I'll go next. Mine's quick. And then Richard, you can go last.

1:18:22Mine is just mostly a shout out to my father-in-law, who I think was the last subscriber to DVD.com. Nice. Which is what Netflix's DVD system has been called for the last bunch of years. And obviously, DVD.com is going out of business. and PSA to anyone who has DVD.com, Netflix is both sending out a bunch of random DVDs. It just seems to have like a warehouse full that it's just shipping to its subscribers. And anything you have, when the system goes away, you get to keep. So I told this to my father-in-law over the weekend and without one word, he ran into their computer room, which they have, sat down and managed his cue to put all his favorite movies at the top because he's like, okay, now I'm going to get a bunch and the system is going to think these are the movies i want to watch so maybe they'll ship them to me at the end so if you have dvd.com now is now is your time you're going to get a bunch of free movies it says dvd.com ship blu-rays i gotta i gotta go this show i'm just saying this is the time to do i'm here for you and there's so much there's so much stuff that has never been released digitally that you can't get streaming video on demand anywhere and it's just on disc and this It's a pretty good chance to get it.

1:19:33Like, take your five favorite movies between now and September 29th that are probably never going to come to streaming. Make it happen. Pump up the volume. There you go. It's never coming. The music rights are too hard. Yeah. All right. Well, now we've lost Neel Eye to his DVD queue. So, Richard, what do you have? The only thing that any of us should be talking about, Samsung has announced a price and a release window for their 57-inch dual UHD gaming monitor. I'm assuming you have like four or five of these already. I am looking at an Odyssey G9 monitor right now, the 49-inch one, which I feel like many people think that is too much to have essentially like two 1440p displays.

1:20:13People are saying that. People say that. Giant curved display that takes up most of your room. I now feel like it's too little because you can get a 57-inch that is like two 4K displays in one giant curved screen. And in the U.S., it'll be available in October for about$2 ,500. bucks. Yeah, I need that. Steal at any price, man. Yeah. The bad news is, you know, having had the G9, it's not great for gaming. Like, you'd think that, like, you can play games that's going to wrap around you and you'll feel very immersed. Basically, no games support 32 by 9 aspect ratio. Surprise! Which, you know, I've guessed that they would spend a lot of time developing for this aspect ratio that no one uses.

1:20:54And the games either stretch in bad ways or they just take up the middle of the screen and other stuff like that. So it's not great for gaming, but like if you, I don't know, maybe run news for a website and you have a billion tabs open, you can have all the tabs. You can have so many tabs on a 57-inch screen. So I'm thinking game in the middle, Slack on the left, browser on the right, and you just crush the internet and fools all day. I love this. $2 ,500 actually is less than I thought this was going to cost, which is like an insane thing to say out loud. But I was pretty sure Samsung was going to be like, this thing is five grand.

1:21:34What are you going to do about it? Here's what I want you to do. If you watch the video where they introduce this thing, the monitor is Elysium. Like it's a spaceship flying over a city that's in the curved monitor. And I don't know that they watched Elysium because that truly implies the monitor has a deeply inequitable class system. It's not Elysium, it's Halo. And when you visit the ring world in Halo, everything was fine right that's how that story went i would just say in general ring worlds uh not great in fiction i'm getting one of these look i gotta kit out a new podcast we're moving so we get a new hat we gotta figure it out so i'm fully in the market for like gamer lights crazy displays this is gonna be a good time i think there's gonna have to be a verge cast series of nilai doing his new podcast room just installing gamer lights if you're an interior designer or have ideas about what nilai needs to put in his new studio uh email them to us vergecast the we didn't talk about the gamer standing disc of course there this thing looks ridiculous i love it i love it the only thing that would be better if the top was a true patch bay with like like quarter inch plugs this to me is like if you took the the r slash battle stations subreddit and like fed it into mid journey and then just said, show me a desk.

1:22:57This is what it would spit out. It's like, it's got a bunch of monitor holders. It's got two different lights. There's speakers everywhere. It has a stream deck. It has a thousand different places to hang things. It loves a pegboard. It's got some controllers. It's like, it is just the perfect average of every insane gamer system you've ever seen. And then I mean that as a compliment, I'm kind of in love with this thing. And that's great, but like they invented a workbench and a pegboard. Yeah, it's good. I mean, we started the show with show us your vintage computer rooms and we're ending the show with like, there's a motorized standing desk with a pegboard.

1:23:35This is the new computer room. Like all the old Office Max Hutches have been replaced by sit-stand desks and pegboards. I'm into it. Maybe I'll get, maybe this, I'm going to build my new podcast studio around this thing. There you go. No, I don't know if I'm going to do that. We'll see. I got to look at this more carefully. All right. We got to end the show. We're way over. This is for a show on a slow news week. I don't even know how we, how we pulled this off. And there's like stuff we didn't even get to, for example, a full hour on Python and Excel. It just didn't happen. One thing I want to call out.

1:24:05This is one of the funniest things that has happened to me today. Our friend, Ashley Carmen, Verge expat now at Bloomberg. She's their podcast and music reporter at Bloomberg. She wrote a story about white noise podcasts on Spotify, in which there are many. And Spotify freaking out because their official white noise license streams make more money than the podcast. So they're like, we have a$38 million white noise podcast problem, which is just the most capitalism thing. Oh, it's amazing. This white noise, if we move it from this bucket to that bucket, it's$38 million. It's ridiculous. So our friend Charlie Harding, who you might know, is the creator of LaserBong, the show, and the co-host of Switched On Pop.

1:24:47he made an entire series of white noise podcasts we'll link them in the show notes now he's worth 700 million dollars my goal and they all have like just truly ridiculous names um they're called sonic spectrum they're all colors he made chat gbt write the descriptions of them venture into the vastness of white noise encompassing every frequency like it's all great my goal is that we make this a real thing we get some wellness blogs to cover it in a serious way and if we can just get to the point where Aaron Rogers is listening to Sonic Spectrum pregame because he loves crystal healing. I'll be very happy.

1:25:26Make this happen. Neelai's end games always end with either Aaron Rogers or Mariah Carey. Those are the two long cons. The Mariah Carey long cons are very different. I gotta upend my family for that one. This one is very direct. Just share Sonic Spectrum as much as you can and see if we can make it a thing. I mean, these descriptions are some of the funniest chat should be t-shirt I've ever read. And then it's just white noise. It's very good. We'll have a link in the show notes. There's a quick post on the site. Go check it out. It's a very, very funny. Okay. That's it. David, what's in installery this week?

1:25:56Anything good? A bunch of good stuff, actually. The PlayStation portal will be in there. Spoiler alert. But I found a new app for organizing all your crap online, which I am, of course, deeply obsessed with. And there's a bunch of new creator stuff and YouTube stuff. And I found this was a surprisingly good week for like random things appearing on the internet so it's gonna be a good one i like it okay that's it that's my chest

1:26:23and that's a wrap for verge cast this week we'd love to hear from you shoot us an email at verge cast at the verge.com the verge cast 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.

1:27:08Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemu? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera! They see us! Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.