Twitter blue check chaos and CarPlay squabbles

27:13And he's got, it's great, highly recommended when it comes out. But he's got a theory in there that new new sites, new properties come into form. They're opportunities that come into form during election years. Oh, I like that. So he's like BuzzFeed News was like rushed out for an election. I actually remember when I was at Vox.com, we pushed it to hit the election. Like that's the moment. Like those cycles, there's lots of news, lots of whatever. This is like, and if you just kind of like look at the history of the media, this is. Yeah. Every four years, for some reason, a new publication. because they line up with elections.

27:47Because there's just like, there's two teams and they hate each other and they keep going to talk shit about it. It's just very easy. Yeah. Right. And I just wonder if this upcoming election cycle is when you see a mass of like people moving to a new kind of media. So like, it's just on my mind that there's a thing happening. The one thing I want to point out before I move on and talk about Spotify completely not knowing what it's doing is Substack put out notes this week, which is basically they added a Twitter feed to Substack in the app that looks exactly like our quick posts on our site. And like the reasoning exactly the same.

28:16Like sometimes you don't want to write a whole thing. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, we made that. But this is the next move, right? It's to, if you talk to any sub stackers, their biggest audience funnel was on Twitter. Like they, they monetize their Twitter audience with sub stack. And if that goes away, I'm not sure where the next generation of sub stackers finds audience. Yeah. Because they can't build it from like Tik TOK or Instagram. The idea of making a Tik TOK video that's like, sign up for my newsletter is so bonkers. can you imagine Casey just like dancing for dollars on TikTok just a little shuffle so there's just a yawning need for a platform that's like Twitter a text-based real-time news platform and someone's gonna fill it and I think that's actually really exciting regardless in the the chaos of Twitter itself is like regardless of the chaos of Twitter itself but it's exciting to see this much activity in that space yeah because there just hasn't been for a long time.

29:10But it's not going to be Mastodon. I'm just going to say it now. That's my third prognostication. So you got... I got... Everybody's going to think the blue check mark's dumb. Elon's going to tweet his dong. And Mastodon is not going to be the true successor. What if he tweets his dong on Mastodon? I'll pay you$20 because I'll just be like, oh my God. I feel strongly that we should take a break. I quit the podcast. Goodbye. We're going to be right back. We got to talk about Spotify. We got to talk about what GM's doing at CarPlay. We'll be right back.

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31:42Welcome back to The Vergecast, where we don't make bets about dogs. No more. It's done moratorium on that. It's good. It's a family show. find your children don't explain what's going on we gotta talk about spotify yeah so in the pandemic spotify decided that it was all in on podcasts and then it was all in on live audio right and then it is not it's done it's done with both of those so spotify bought this thing called what was it green room david it renamed it green room um the app before it was bought by spotify was called Locker Room because it was specifically about like live talk about sports was like their main thing.

32:25And then they renamed it Green Room and they were going to compete with Clubhouse. Which is itself, by the way, just a hilarious statement. They were going to compete with Clubhouse is now with hindsight a very funny thing to say. It turns out you could compete with Clubhouse. And the thing that competed with Clubhouse was leaving your house. It was outdoors. Like any other room with people in it competed with Clubhouse. Touch grass. Yes. Look, in the depths of the pandemic, I swear to God, the tech industry was like, all right, we've got them. Brains and vats are never leaving the house again.

32:56Software will eat not only the world, but the human population. And like, I get it. We had a million versions of this conversation, like what trends are here to stay and what trends are going to go back? And most everybody bet wrong. And now all these companies are having layoffs. But the reason I want to talk about Spotify in particular is their big bet on podcasts is shaky. Yeah. And then this big bet on live audio where you would just like open Spotify at the end of the night and. Talk? Dudes would be talking. What is next for this company? Have they heard of music? Have they heard of like, I think everybody just needs to go look at Apple Music Classical and do that.

33:39Like if Spotify did that and gave you more access to metadata and let you search and browse that way, that would be better than to spend all the money on Locker Room and rename it Green Room, which I presume is just Broadway show tunes. So I was reading the comments of your Apple Music classical piece, which was great. Everyone should go read it. And a lot of people in the comments were like, this is Rune. Oh, really? And so if you don't know what Rune is, Rune is a wild idea. It is a subscription-based music player that has no music in it. So you got to plug it into a title account or a lot of people use this thing called Quobuz.

34:11Is this the one that like you use for your smart home? Yeah, like people integrate with smart homes, but it's a music player. Right. So you like plug it in a title or if you have a big local library on your Linux distribution server, it'll like read it all. It'll figure out all the metadata. It'll show you like lots of links. It'll reorganize the metadata. Okay, this guitar player in this song played on this song. Yeah. And the thing people say is like, this is just a discovery interface. I'm just like falling down the rabbit hole of music in a way that like. But you don't have Kazaa to like back up the falling down.

34:45Right. You got to pay for it. You got to pay the money. You got to source your music somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I spent like a significant part of my legal career defending kids who used Kazaa. Thank you. They all lost. Oh, no. Just like, you know, these are not winnable cases. Yeah. And that's why Kazaa is a hundred billion dollar company. They did it, everybody. No, but the thing about that is I what I was going to say is what Spotify needs to do is stop thinking about itself as the audio company. Like that's what they've been saying over and over. Right. They're not a music thing. They're about audio.

35:16And what it actually seems like needs to happen and where there is much more room for doing interesting stuff is to go all in on music. Like Spotify should take the fact that every musician has a link tree in their social bios as like a direct threat to Spotify. And if you want to buy merch, that should be Spotify. If you want to buy concert tickets, that should be Spotify. Like there is no money to be made in licensing music to stream on a platform. There's a hell of a lot of money to be made in all of the other ways that artists make money. And that all sucks now. Like everybody's mad at Ticketmaster, thanks to Taylor Swift.

35:52Buying stuff on the internet is a disaster. Everybody's merch stores are ridiculous. Like if I'm Spotify, I'm chasing the entire music industry much more than I'm chasing the audio industry. at this point yeah but i what spotify wants you to do is pay them 15 or 20 a month and then keep all the money right and the thing you're describing is like what if other people made money right like when you listen to music on spotify some complicated set of algorithms assigns four cents to every artist that you listen to per stream whatever and they've got to give a huge chunk of your subscription dollar away when you listen to podcasts that is not true because they've already bought and ingested them when they have like a weird relationship with the music industry right because of the fact that you know they only get four cents for every song but the music industry also owns a huge chunk of spotify yeah so they so theoretically they could just go in and be like okay you're the new ticket master let's go yeah i mean maybe ticket master also owns all the venues this is a very complicated thing to unwind i'm just saying if you look at spotify's arc right right they desperately tried to keep more of your dollars by pointing you at audio that they already they owned outright so they don't have to pay further royalties on or that other that users are making for free and things like what spotify clubhouse jr or whatever it was called green room green room clubhouse jr is really different we don't we don't talk about that here i'm just saying like i think spotify is not in just in a shakier zone yeah than any of the other big tech companies like we we talk about the other streamer like we'll end up talking about disney and it's like war with the state of florida and it's reorg and netflix and all this other stuff and they've all had cuts and they've like stopped spending money spotify is a streaming service its competitors are apple and amazon which heavily subsidize their services and then they're a title and time to forget about title dear sweet title which is part of block which has like a research report it's like block is built on fraud very good not great uh so yeah It's just a weird, a weird moment for that company in particular.

37:59Yeah. And it, the same ways with Twitter, right? It's the foundation of like an entire ecosystem. And it's like, what if that one, what if this domino falls? Yeah. I mean, the thing for Spotify though, is I think because the music industry is so invested in it, it, they just, they're, they can't let it fall, right? Like you let it fall and it's just Apple, Amazon, and YouTube own the music business. And that for the music business is like an abject disaster. so I would I have high or like Deezer like what if Deezer just wins go get it Deezer like I'm in on that plan Fall Rune we should talk so this brings me to CarPlay oh yeah okay everybody's favorite Deezer consumption only way I listen to Deezer well it's interesting like so GM had an announcement this week very odd announcement they released a fact sheet and then I think only Reuters like read it and like Reuters had headlines like GM walks away from carplay and we saw that headline and we were like no yeah that's dumb and then we acquired the fact sheet which we published so people could actually see this was sourced because it is such a bonkers thing to say that we didn't think people would believe our headline so we like put the pdf in the story um they're walking away from carplay and android auto in just the evs and their reasoning is that the cars are computers now and that they want to do things like have you used the built-in nav so that when you're on your way to a charging station, the battery is preconditioned so you can charge faster.

39:26Yeah, that sounds great. I wish they thought of that 20 years ago. Like, welcome to the party, GM. I think this is the beginning. I think every automaker is going to start to do things like this in five years. That's the public reasoning, right? And it's like that reading the story, it was like, that's the one thing they could think to say that sounded like a feature. And then everything else is just, we don't make any money from CarPlay. And we think there's a lot of money to be made and not car play right like is there any other way to read this than that yeah patrick george did a great piece for the site that was just that he went and spoke to a lot of people and they're like oh yeah they just want to make money and so they're gonna they're gonna kill it so that they can like yeah the future of cars is no steering wheels and you're shopping all day in the car or looking at ads while you like stream movies or whatever like just like minority report i have been to enough ces future of car panels where they're like soon we will reclaim the time you spend commuting and it's like oh awesome for what for literature for art and like for advertising and e-commerce it's like oh that's not what i thought we get 30 percent to improve the human condition and it's like no no no shopping candy crush uh candy crush so yes i think that's what jam wants to do i do think there's some valid stuff in there right?

40:41If you make a self-driving car and you don't control the navigation system, you almost certainly have a problem. Are you saying this because you hate car play and you want to support big, big car? Yes. I love big car. Big car. Big car's my favorite. You know, big car. Who doesn't love a big car? Yeah. My parents, by the way, refer to our cars as small, medium, and big. That's why I was like, can we borrow your medium car? It's a real thing that happens. I love that so much. It's very good. No, I think CarPlay is bad. Like, just to be clear, this is my opinion. CarPlay is bad. It is superior to have the radio on the bad infotainment screen and then mount your phone using a MagSafe charger.

41:24We'll put an affiliate link in the show notes. This is my white whale. It's like the world's best MagSafe charger. If you make a new one that's like 5 % better than the one, I will buy it in a heartbeat. I will spend$70 on a new MagSafe charger. I'm imagining like, you know, For the people who have like McDonald's boxes all over their cars, that's just you with MagSafe chargers. You like can't get in the passenger seat because there's 200 MagSafe chargers. It's a perfect impulse by gadget. I swear to God. Because you can always make it 5 % better. The magnets click a little harder. The charging's a little faster.

41:54The mount's a little smarter. And you put them out. My phone is almost as big as the infotainment screen in my car. What year is your car? The Raptor is a 2020. Okay. And that's a tiny little screen. That's before the new big screen. So that one is like, whatever. That's Sync 3. I've sworn on blood oath that I will not buy another Ford until they go to the Android-based system. I'm like, I can't have more Sync in my life. It's real bad. It's not allowed. This is the point, right? Like, CarPlay is bad, except that it's so much better than everything that any of the company does. It absolutely is not better.

42:27It is way better. So I've got a Mazda CX-5, and I know every single time I forget to plug my phone in because they'll be like, I'm just going to call someone. And this robot voice is like, who do you want to call? I'm like, who the hell are you? Yeah, I don't know what you're doing there. You can make it. I'm just saying. So they're all small screens, except for our new Jeep, which is an Android computer and is basically like a Tamagotchi. I have to go into the garage every night and be like, are you okay? Just petting the car. And we like this better than CarPlay. Just to be clear, this is an improvement on just plugging your phone in and everything works fine.

43:02I think consumer satisfaction with car infotainment systems has been going steadily down since wireless CarPlay was introduced because it's so unreliable. That's what Monica was talking about this when we were having a huge argument. And I was telling you, you were both wrong for hating CarPlay because she had it wireless and it kept like disconnecting. And she'd be like driving and it'd be like, where are we going? And she'd be like, where? You should know. Right. And so integrated is better than weird fragmented. I'm just telling you, it is superior to mount your phone in the car using a, I should just make a wireless MagSafe charger at this point.

43:32It's superior to mount your phone, put the map on there, and then do your audio. Because you can deal with it. You can get through it. We just need a little slot and you just pop your phone in. Yeah. And it just, it's your phone. Yeah. And just done. Anyhow, the reason I'm zooming out, CarPlay is horrible and I'm correct and I don't know what it is. Wrong. It's not good. The only thing you want to do with it is show your maps. Are you so excited about having the one app for music that exists? Like they're literally what the end of this is. No, because I'm going to stick my phone on the dash and it's going to start charging through the power of magnetism.

44:02It's going to be awesome every time. You can't stop me. You're arguing for more dongles. Steve Chevy, what are you going to do to my house? Arrest me? He's getting in his little car. Pull me over. He's getting in his small car. Because I use the blinding power of magnets to overcome your stupid infotainment? No. I'm going to do whatever I want. You can't see. Make your point, David. Let me just make sure I understand. So what you're arguing is I would like to get in my car. I would like to attach my phone to an incredibly powerful magnet. And then I would like to plug my phone in to some thing.

44:37No, it's just the magnet is there. Are you listening to music out of the speakers of your phone? No, it's Bluetooth into the car. GM's going to still let you Bluetooth into the car. Okay. So you're playing your music over Bluetooth. You're steering wheel controls to control the music player. And you got a map on the phone. and you're not stuck in some weird projection system and you've got two screens. What Vergecast listener does not want two screens going instead of one? What if I had one small good screen and one big bad screen? Like what a cool future that is. The Mercedes experience. I don't know, man.

45:10I'm just saying CarPlay is not great and Apple's dream that it would colonize all of the screens in your car is hitting reality. Remember last year at WWDC where they're like, here's the future of CarPlay? Yes. And they showed all the logos and all the car companies like, uh. They were like, nah. What are you doing? It's about to be a year later. No car makers have announced any plans to support that version of CarPlay. And GM's like, actually, we're not going to support CarPlay at all because we need to take the screen back because this is where people will shop in the future. By giving it to Google.

45:42Yeah. Like they're just going to make something crappy. Like all of the other systems. You're still using your phone when you use your very powerful magnet because the system behind your phone is garbage. They're all garbage. And CarPlay's just a little better. And I really. That's not. I mean, you're. But like GM's not going to do better. They did Q. Like your car infotainment in the best case scenario now is like a four year old Android tablet. Like congratulations on your four year old Android tablet. So the argument that I'll give. I don't own a Tesla, but every Tesla owner has already experienced this life.

46:16Right. Where like there's no CarPlay integration. They've asked for it. But Tesla's like, this is the future. We want to control your experience in the car. We're going to put games on here. We're going to do over the year updates every day. Every automaker thinks that's their future too. Whether or not they can execute at the level that Tesla has executed remains to be seen. Yeah. I think it makes sense. They all want to do this. They're doing the exact same thing TV makers did where they're all like, we're going to own the home and we're going to put our smart TV in. And most of them have been like, this kind of sucks.

46:46Yeah. Go buy it. I'm just saying the outrage about GM walking away from CarPlay, if you just look at CarPlay itself, it's kind of bad. I love it. But that's the thing. The fact that CarPlay, and there have been all these stats that say 80 % of people won't buy a car without CarPlay. It's not because CarPlay is magical software. It's because everything else is shit. The thing about Tesla is Tesla has people who make good software and has a decent reputation for making good software. And a lot of Tesla people still want CarPlay. but at least this stuff broadly works, right? Like it's pretty good software.

47:20There is nothing in the history of the auto industry to suggest that they know how to make good software. They didn't know how to make good simple software. Like when all the software had to do was change the radio station, it was horrible. And now I'm supposed to assume that these companies are just gonna turn around and figure out how to make it. Like CarPlay and Android Auto worked because they were so bad at making software in cars. So they just came and said, well, we're just gonna show up and go over the top. And like what, how, is there any evidence that has changed? Isn't one of the car makers is doing like a skeuomorphic one, right?

47:51Didn't they all invest in like Epic? No, they all run Unreal Engine. So the new Mustang, which is still sync. Why? But like all the graphics in it are Unreal Engine. There's like Rivians or Unreal Engine. It's such high res sync. It's so high res. I mean, it looks beautiful. And you're like, is this the new Android system that you announced like over 18? And they're like, no, it's not, sir. It's garbage, what it is. It's like hot, hot garbage. Look, QNX will never go away. It's going to be in Forge forever. They did announce an Android-based system. It's supposed to come out. No one knows when it's coming out.

48:25But it runs Unreal Engine, and that's all the graphics. Rivians run Unreal Engine. There's tons of that going on in the auto space because they know that when they move to EV drivetrains, the actual difference in driving a car will be nil. They cannot make it very – all the cars are going to kind of be the same. Is that why they're all making such futuristic looking designs? Because they have to loudly exclaim, this is a new kind of car or else no one will notice? Yeah. And put the little Hemi speaker in so it sounds like a Hemi. Yeah. That's my Hemi impression. That's not. That's the wrong sound.

49:02That's a Honda impression. The Fratzonic speaker in the new charger, the EV charger or whatever. No, the EV Challenger. Yeah. It's like. rumbles. Yeah, it's like a dinosaur sound. I can't get that low. My voice doesn't go that low. Anyhow, they're doing it because this is their opportunity to break from history and they know, they're like, the EV buyer wants to feel special. EVs are more expensive and they have to be more expensive because the margins are lower on these cars because they're full of new technology that hasn't been proven out. And then they all think we're all going to not drive and shop in the car.

49:37I promise you, every auto CEO is like, I can't wait for people to start shopping in their cars on our screens where we take 30 percent and like the CEO of BMW is like and soon you'll subscribe to your heated seats and they're and people hate all of that yeah no one like like Apple Apple was has the benefit of being first movers and the I'm gonna bake a big technological walled garden and all the car companies are now like 30 years later saying we're gonna do it too and everybody's like no that sucks yeah yeah we're just heading back to the early days of cell phones where everybody had their own operating system with their own app store with their own brand new ideas about how to do absolutely everything the weird thing that's different here is they're all picking android because it's easy to build on well but it's like weird so like the gm system is google built in so it's not a hundred percent clear if the thing is android yeah like the operating system is android but the navigation is google maps is it gonna have like Play Store in it.

50:36Ooh. Yeah. Like, is it Android like Huawei is Android or is it Android like... So my Jeep is Android like Huawei is Android. Yeah. And boy, does it show. Boy, is that obvious. And that's bad. That's like not a place to go. Like... They're very proud of it. Getting three guys who just graduated from college to build your entire car infotainment system seems like a bad idea. And that's kind of the sense of what I get from all of these attempts. Right. They've all forked Android in some way. Or they're using QNX and Google is there to be their mapping provider. Yeah. Or there's Android Automotive, which is Google's OS of your car, which is like what Polestar uses.

51:17But just in response to David, they're all picking Google services. So Google is colonizing more of the auto industry, whereas Apple is like, what if we do all the screens for you? Same with TVs. They did the same thing, right? None of the TV makers wanted to. They all wanted to build their own TV stuff. And then one day they said, oh, Android does it good enough. And then we can still slap all our logos on everything and pop it out. And that's what they've done. So Android's just doing that again for a new market. Yeah, it's hard to see consumers not change their cars enough. Right. So it's like that market is just moving way, way, way, way slower.

51:52Yeah, because it's like every, what, 10 years? I don't know. I just got this car. Who knows? I have it forever. Forever. Have you gotten a MagSafe from that for you? No, because I plug in with the lightning and then I throw it in my. I'm just going to get, I've got like a drawer full. I'm just going to get you one. Bring me your second best one. You can keep your best one, but bring me like your second. Yeah, I'm giving you my best one. It's completely off the table. Absolutely not. You open that door just to suggest that I give you the best one. I just like, how are you going to convince me otherwise?

52:21I really need to feel that snap. It's very good. Oh my God. Oh, a good MagSafe click. It's very good. Anyhow. Yeah. I'm telling you, at WWDC this year, Apple will say nothing about CarPlay. This is my prediction because it has gone nowhere. It's all going to be heads to talk anyway. And then this time next year, two more automakers will have dropped phone projection. That's my other prediction. I can see it. No dongs in sight. I'm glad I bought a car already. My bets are better than yours. All right. We got to take a break, and we got a little bit of a lightning round. There's a lot going on in this lightning round.

52:55We'll be right back.

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55:19All right, we're back. What? I'm super right. I just realized at some point on the Vergecast, we're going to do an entire segment about Neely's favorite MagSafe chargers, and I could not be more excited about it. Right now I'm on Belkin. I've got a Mophie one in the truck. No, I don't. Don't. I have a Moment one in the truck. I want to just hear the click. I want you to do a whole segment where you just click them all against the microphone so we can really hear it for you. Andrew, our producer, just instantly greenlit that segment. Absolutely guaranteed. Done. So the truck is weird because there's not a cigarette port, a power port close enough to it.

55:56It's just a weird situation. So I can use the Moment ones, which aren't actually chargers. And Moment uses stronger magnets. Ooh. And they're very proud of their stronger magnets, which are not MagSafe approved. So if you get in a car accident, your phone probably isn't twirling around. All the metal in your car is going to attach to the chip. That's very good. Welcome to the third segment of the Verge Cast, where we just continue the previous segment about how cool magnets are. magsave is legitimately my favorite feature on the phone is that your lightning have you done the thing where you hang the puck in your bathroom yet next to your mirror no you got to get a magsave they're like five bucks on amazon like i live in a small apartment whatever just hang the puck on the mirror and then when you're like brushing your teeth you can like have youtube tv open it's great i'm all right i'm tired it's like it's the best thing you can do i'll believe you all right i believe you in my heart.

56:47I'm never going to do it. There's a person who has a five-year-old in their house. Like, this is my me time, baby. I'm like, just like rocking and rolling, watching TV in the bathroom. All right. Lightning round. David, you start. Sure. So I had two. We'll do, they're both fairly quick. The first one is that Walmart rolled out a big redesign of its website because Walmart, which I have been proclaiming is a secret, like sneaky tech giant and nobody realizes it is now a drastically better looking website than amazon.com which yes a very funny thing that happened this week was when this news came out everybody sort of all at once had this moment on our staff of being like wait amazon is ugly like what a bad website amazon.com is and we've all just been sort of slowly like frog boiling in water to amazon.com and we just didn't realize it's a hideous website and then walmart which used to be a roughly equivalently hideous website, came out and said, oh, we care about curation and we're going to make things look a little nicer and we're going to use colors and the names of things aren't going to be 65 words long.

57:49And we're going to have a thing that actually makes sense for shopping. And everybody's just like, oh, Amazon sucks. That was my favorite part of this whole thing. It was like Walmart did a redesign and it was like, you know what's bad? It's Amazon.com. Yeah, it does look very pretty. It's nice. It looks nice. I'm still not going to shop there. But like, I appreciate that Walmart was like, we're getting our asses kicked and we're actually going to come back and go after a big tech company, even though we're just the guys that like destroy small towns with our giant, very convenient and lovely shopping centers.

58:19We had the CEO of Barnes and Noble on Decoder. And I was like, this is quite a turnaround for you. Remember, you used to like destroy small town bookstores. And he's like, you know, Amazon exists now. He's like, don't worry about it. We're the little guys. We're what you need. Like he's like small bookstores can't exist without Barnes and Noble because they are the distributor of the small bookstores now. Wow. So like your local independent bookseller is like it needs a Barnes and Noble to exist. Otherwise, Amazon will crush it. That's incredible. I love that. I don't know if Walmart is that thing for people, but.

58:51Not yet. Not yet. Quite a take though. But yeah, Walmart has been on this like relentless quest to just solve logistics in a way I think is super funny and interesting that during the pandemic, they started talking a lot about. we're going to turn our stores into essentially like super optimized warehouses for instacart shoppers to come pick stuff up and they were really big on curbside pickup and they've just they have this like omni-channel buy everything any way you want it all magically appears at your house vision in their head and i don't know if it's what anyone actually wants out of their life but it is the vision that like that that walmart has and i find it sort of fascinating watching them go after it.

59:30They're like, they saw Amazon doing what they do best and doing it a little better. And they went, oh, wait, no, we're the biggest guy in the room. We're not just going to give that up. And as a meet have a meet because they were for the longest time, they were like the largest employer in the United States. And Amazon took that over. And so Walmart's like, no, no, no, we can employ the most people. No, we actually already have all these warehouses built out. We don't have to go do it. We just call them stores, super centers. and in fact we can just fill that with crap and get it to you faster.

1:00:00So like that part of it I think is really, really interesting. They just said, nah, we're really good at doing this. F you. There's a weird set of rumors that Walmart will be the one to buy TikTok, which I think is just like perfect. What? It's very good. I don't know if it's true. I've just heard the rumors. Okay, here's my pick. Speaking of Amazon. Okay. And things Amazon does. Pretty devastating report in the Hollywood Reporter this week about Amazon Prime Studios. Yeah. I don't know how badly it's going over there. I'm just going to do the disclosure now. I'm going to talk about streaming.

1:00:32Get ready. Buckle up. Comcast, NBC Universal Division, is an investor in Vox Media. They own Peacock. Comcast does not love me, but they own Peacock. That's a competitor. We made a Netflix show. I'm the EP of a Netflix show. I've used Hulu. Yeah. Everyone in this room has opinions about that. I like Succession. It's on HBO. Yeah. Disclosures. Amazon Prime Video. They invest a ton of money in the Lord of the Rings series. Yep. 37 % completion rate. It's brutal. No one talks about it. Did you watch it? No. Yeah. I watched all of it. It's from Nerds. What do I look like? It was real bad. I fell asleep.

1:01:10I did laundry during it. It was one of those shows. Did you do this? Yeah. When I was told it was slow, their quote in the piece was like, we're definitely doing a second season. This was all world building, which is bad. Season one was just set up for season two. $100 million of world building. Whatever. Nerds. Yeah, nerd stuff. Yeah. Look at these wizards, huh? Elves? Here are some elves. That's what it was, though. You're right. That's what it was. That was this show. Have you met Hobbits? You love those, right? Soon they'll all collide. It's a very slow show. But the bigger point is Amazon's entire idea about this thing is you will subscribe to Prime.

1:01:54And you'll get great shows. And that'll make you stay subscribed to Prime so you keep shopping on Prime. Right. And the thing itself does not need an identity. It just has to be good enough that you're happy about it and stay subscribed to Prime. What is fascinating to me now, because I really want your view of this, is the normals that I know are all Fire TV people. Yeah. Like everyone, all of Becky's aunts are like Fire TV people. Not Roku? Not Roku. It's all Fire TV. It's bonkers to me. That's wild. And I'm like, are they happy with Prime? Are they watching The Lord of the Rings? Clearly not.

1:02:29Prime is stealthy. Technically, it has the largest number of subscribers, or the second largest, over 200 million subscribers. But that's because they're also just regular Prime shipping subscribers. And so most people, I don't think, really think about it that often, except for when they want to watch a movie and it happens to have it. Or they heard, like, a leave of their own, and then they watched it and went, this is gay. Because it's very gay. It's great. Watch it. but a lot of people then were like no i didn't want that and clicked out um so i don't think as many people are engaging with it and we're there that was a big part of that piece too was about how it hasn't had a big hit yeah the closest it's had is a couple like bro shows like the boys and the boys is great jack reacher do you like jack reacher i didn't watch back real bro like it's like bro spy show the boys is particularly weird because i think people are taking the wrong message from the boys.

1:03:18Yes. Which is that Homelander is cool. And it's like, that's not it. Yeah. That's not what that shows. They're like, what if white supremacy was awesome? No, no, wrong, wrong. Yeah. Kill it. What if we lasered everyone's heads if they pissed us off? That would rule the boy. It's like, no, that's not. Yeah. That's not it. Everyone. Most people, it doesn't have these big moments. Like it got Fleabag, but Fleabag wasn't even an Amazon show. They picked it up. They acquired it from, I think, the BBC or something. That's fine. Yeah. And then, and this was a detail that was in the story. Amazon then gave Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who created Fleabag, a truckload of money to make more stuff.

1:03:56And then she didn't make anything for them. So she was supposed to make, part of the issue here is that their idea is, okay, we need to get people on board. So we're going to throw money at creators, which is reasonably good, especially nowadays where everybody's throwing money around. Yeah, it's what everybody did. But then they're not following through. And so like Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Donald Glover were supposed to make a Mr. and Mrs. Smith show. There was things did not go well there. There were some personality clashes and stuff. So they parted ways. And she's still now doing a Tomb Raider show.

1:04:25But she has a tendency to go and come up with the idea for a show and then walk away. Because that's what she's like. Killing Eve, she did the first season and she's like, this is cool. Bye. And the show got progressively worse as different showrunners came on. The first season is amazing. It's really good. The show still was great. I loved it. but yeah so they're doing that a bunch they're just throwing money at people and then being like hey do you do anything with that 20 mil we gave you no cool here's why can't i get these deals right like i gotta go do that that sounds great the thing that really strikes me with all of these is the harshest criticism and i think the most devastating criticism in the story is they don't know what they want yes yeah right and that is to some extent the criticism of netflix all the big sort of data driven to some extent the criticism of youtube is like this thing has no point of view It's just a mishmash of stuff.

1:05:12It's all driven by data. Well, and they hired. So the person who's running Amazon Prime, she was hired to have vision and she does have vision. Like she was a big fan of a league of their own. She's been pushing some other stuff and she's running into conflict with the people who are data driven. And then also the stuff that she puts all her effort into. It's not working. Doesn't actually land. Lord of the Rings. Yeah. So it's well, that wasn't her deal. Like she came in to do that. That was Jeff Bezos being like, I want to watch my nerd show. The Expanse. Yeah. Which spun completely, like literally into orbit.

1:05:46Yeah. The second they went through that gate, I was like, the show's done. I'm over it. And more seasons came. Yeah, they kept making it. So many seasons. I just want to compare that to HBO, which absolutely has a point of view and just like fires off hit after hit. Right. Even with all the corporate chaos of HBO and AT &T and all the rest, they're like, what we do is we make things we like and then we show them to people and that's how you get the white lotus and succession and all the rest of it and it just doesn't seem like the tech companies that want to take over streaming have gotten it with the notable exception of apple yeah apple's the only one and they they and that was partly because they hired a bunch of hbo people yeah so part of this is is amazon doesn't want to listen to to these people that they hire they go and they hire them and they're like let's do this and amazon's like no let's do this other stuff and and so there's just this constant disconnect and netflix is having the same issue netflix is totally driven by the algorithm to the point that it cancels shows that are really really popular and then gets people furious and lots of bad press and everybody yells at them and apple has figured this out because they just trusted that we don't know what we're doing here we're gonna pay people who do and let them work and like get out of the way and also give them a ton of money to do it just a ton.

1:07:01Well, and to be fair, Apple has had its share of stinkers. It's just also had some really massive successes in a way that Amazon hasn't. But the thing for me is it's always been like this at Amazon. Like, do you remember when Amazon would put out a bunch of pilots and let people vote on which ones they thought should go to series? Like, it turns out that if you do the whole Amazon thing, which is like, start with what the customer wants and, you know, go out to the end, which is how Amazon says it does everything, you're going to get shitty stuff because people don't know what they want. And if you ask people what they want, they're going to say Lord of the Rings.

1:07:34And then you have to make a good Lord of the Rings show. And that's much harder than just saying, do you like Lord of the Rings? But then on the flip side, Amazon, at least as far as I can tell, has never been at all clear about what its video stuff is for. And even in the course of this story, they talked a bunch about like one of the compelling things about Lord of the Rings was all the like merchandising opportunities, right? And they've talked about this with football too, that if you get people to sign up, like we're going to be able to sell you football related things like maybe you'll buy your Tostitos through Thursday Night Football and that that's actually as big a victory as getting you to watch Thursday Night Football through Prime Video.

1:08:08And so there's just been this weird thing where it's like, what what are these shows and movies here to accomplish for Amazon? And I don't necessarily think Amazon has a clear answer to that. They at least have not communicated that to Hollywood. And until they do, it's going to keep being the same thing where people just come in. They're like, what do you want from us? Like, what does success look like here? And they had even people saying that. I think the guy that did A League of Their Own was like, what do you want from us? Like, greenlit our show. They want to sell baseball bats. Apparently.

1:08:38Just the little girls. All right. This is the longest lightning round ever. You can tell. We have a lot of feelings about this story. Yeah. But it is notable that the data-driven streamers are not producing hits at the rate of the people who are just like, have taste. Yeah. There's a lesson there. Shock. All right. What's your lightning round item? Oh, so mine is kind of I'm folding two in together because we had some handheld news this week. So first of all, Asus on April Fool's Day was like this was not great. It was really bad. Asus was like, hey, we're going to do a really cool handheld April Fool's.

1:09:10And everybody's like, well, that's stupid. Like the Steam Deck exists. You could have done that. And then a few days later, they're like, oh, actually, we are doing it. And everybody's like, well, that was stupid. Why didn't why did you message it with April Fool's? And I think the idea there was supposed to be you'd get really excited and wish it existed. and then be really excited when it did exist. The classic April Fool's Gambit. Yeah, and instead they just pissed everybody off. And we don't really know a lot about the pricing or what's involved. There's a couple of YouTubers that have seen it so far.

1:09:40It seems potentially really cool. It runs Windows. Could be neat. Could be$600 and nobody would want to spend that on a handheld when a Steam Deck's on. Why is it called the Rog Ally? Because it's your ally in gaming. Oh my God. Also, have you ever seen Asus's product names? ROG Ally is like the best it's ever been. ROG is Republic of Gamer, which was a gaming thing that they acquired years ago. And so they just... This is the ally. Yeah. This is your friend. I'll take it. And then the other part of this is Sony is considering also making a handheld super late to that party in some respects, even though they did the Vita and they did the PSP and they both were great, overpriced.

1:10:19Nobody bought them except for me and probably Sean. I had a PSP. Okay. You, me, and Sean. Yeah. We were the three that owned the PSP. It was great. Mine was pink. Did I have a Vita too? There's a real chance I might have had a Vita. The Vita was like, it had like 3G in it. You were like, it's like, it's practically a phone. I can justify this purchase. It's weird that a gadget made so little impression that I can't remember if I owned one, but it feels like the sort of thing that I bought. It was not great. The games were great for it. But so Sony is looking into this again, curiously, not for cloud gaming.

1:10:49That's probably because they have a really bad cloud gaming infrastructure. they farmed it all out to Microsoft they don't everybody's somebody's going to yell at me in the comments and I'm sorry I know you all love it and it works but it's garbage so they're not making it for that they're making it for remote play so you can just play your PS5 far away from your house but that might be the only thing you can do with it and how much is it going to cost because everybody's struggling to get it under$400 and why would you spend$400 on something to just play your PS5 that's at home when you could spend$400 on the Steam Deck that lets you do that and play other games.

1:11:25I would assume this has to be coming alongside some huge expansion in Sony's cloud gaming stuff. Because if not, you're exactly right. This just becomes history's most expensive, barely useful PlayStation peripheral. Just slightly edging the move sticks that existed. But just barely edging. It was emphatically like it's not for cloud gaming. It's for remote play, which is why it's so weird. Also, the name is bad. What's the name? Q-Lite. That's okay. It's worse than Rogali. Yeah, I was like, which do you want Rogali? Or QAnon, the video game system. Let's hope that's a code name. Yeah. Can I tell you?

1:12:07Whatever. They can do whatever they want. Okay. It's fine. You'll buy it. Sony needs to put PSVR2 Gran Turismo demo stations in every mall and store and 7-Eleven in America. How many times have you vomited playing it? No. So the first day was really bad. Okay. So I had Addy send me one of our PSVR2 review units, and then I bought a Logitech G923 wheel and pedals. Love it. And a chair. I was like, whatever. It's fully ridiculous. But I live in the woods. I'm in the basement. No one can see me. Headset on. And the first day I was like, oh, this is a mistake. Super queasy. And then just a couple days later, it's fine.

1:12:47Okay. A couple days of queasy. I'm obsessed. It is like being in the stupid cars. Love that. Do you like miss the brake? Do you have brake pushback and stuff? Like when a real car, you can feel it when you're braking? No, because it's just plastic pedals. I don't know. You know you can spend like 30 grand on this setup, Nilay. And I feel like we're headed down a dangerous road. I've spent a bunch of credit card points and this is fine. I haven't spent like it was like$100 and a bunch of credit card points to accomplish this setup. It is legitimately the most compelling thing you can do in VR. Yeah.

1:13:21Like it is so cool. It's so much fun. You convince yourself that you're moving, which is like absolutely bizarre to be sitting dead still holding a plastic wheel that you cannot see because you're wearing a VR headset and like leaning your body. Like it's crazy. I took off, my wife came down the stairs the other day, and I took off the headset, and I literally went, you gotta try this! And she was like, what is wrong with you? I just went right back up the stairs. She was like, I'm out of here. For all of the, we talked so much about last week, talked about AR, killer apps, all this stuff. It's an incredibly complicated full setup.

1:13:56Yeah. It's like$1 ,500 worth of stuff, right? You need a PS5, you need a headset, which is another$500,$600. You need to buy a wheel, a chair. It's all ridiculous. Chair. And you can. you can spend like$30 ,000 on like full motion, iRacing, PC-based. Max Verstappen, the F1 racer, has a full rig in his trailer. So he leaves F1 races and then sim races against people using his real name, which is incredible. Badass. Devastating. Sim racing as yourself is the coolest imaginable thing. And all that's fine. And like, I have friends and I've tried those things on screens with the three, three screens around you.

1:14:33I'm telling you, put on a VR headset. You're like, oh, this is the coolest thing you can do in VR. Yeah. Sony needs to throw this cloud gaming, whatever. Get people the headsets with the racing games. That's like their Tetris. Yeah. It's$1 ,500 of sim racing setup. Also, it judges you every time you put it on. It's like, are you sitting down again? And it's like, I'm definitely sitting down again. It's like, don't you want to play standing up, moving around? It's like, no, no, no. I'm in the chair, bro. Stationary mode. What's up? Yeah. Let's go. Every time it's like, are you stationary again?

1:15:05it's like sure him let's just put the pedal to the metal bro it's a very good okay one more wait how many picks are we at that was like one each basically we did one each you you get one more and then i think we should probably go all right let me wrap this up last lightning round item this is me just assigning myself a story again we'll have it on the website tomorrow okay something is happening in wisconsin cheese 49ers uh aaron rogers is leaving it's the only things anyone can pick up so as you know i'm obsessed with the fox on plot which is just minutes away from the trout my childhood home in wisconsin yeah they're gonna do something on it and it's not coffee robots or whatever nonsense they claim they were doing it's definitely not building tvs aka i yeah wait so the first thing let's just let's run through the history of this real fast so it was real fast it was gonna be it was gonna be tvs right yes so in the trump Trump administration, Donald Trump, golden shovel breaks ground with Terry Goad, chairman of Fox Hahn, says we're building a TV factory in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin.

1:16:12They ram it through. They bulldoze houses, the whole thing. AI, 8K plus 5G. Sure. The plus. They're going to do 15 ,000 jobs, billions in tax subsidies. I don't need to tell you that this did not happen. It was never going to happen, and it definitely did not happen. At one point in the course of this story when they broke ground in the factory uh display experts told us that foundation doesn't look correct for an lcd fab and we asked them and they said the special clay soil in wisconsin does not means that we do not need to build the foundation that you need in the rest of the world and i went i'm from there and no one ever told me that the dirt was special so that was weird so then they built this weird building they call it the multi-purpose building It is all but empty.

1:17:01They use it for storage. They had it rezoned to storage. They claim they had coffee robots. They think they're making server boards for Google there, but they won't claim. No reporters have ever been there. There's a tiny dome that they claim is a data center, but the actual data center is in shipping containers outside the dome. It's all very good. Geodesic dome, right? Yeah. It's like a little. It's like buying my parents' house. Every time I go home, I look at it. I'm like, it's so small. It's just a little snow globe data center. And it's just like a conference center. You can rent it out for weddings.

1:17:30So anyhow, first of all, let's do that. Yeah. If any First Cast listeners are getting married, might I interest you in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin? Neelai will officiate your wedding at the Dome. That's true. Every time when my sister got married, my parents renovated the house. When I got married, they did the backyard. They're looking to do the bathroom, and apparently it takes a wedding to kick them into gear. So if you're listening to this, let me know. So there's a news report. Somebody tweeted this at me and just looking at Twitter in the background. I came upon it days late. Mount Pleasant, the board that approved the Fox Hunt deal, just like quietly announced that Microsoft would be building a data center there.

1:18:12They did this a week before the election. So they announced this thing. Microsoft is building a data center. They have not taken the votes to do it, but they announced it before the election to prove that Fox Hunt is a great idea. So I'm looking at the story and I'm like, I don't know about this. I will say Microsoft President Brad Smith is from Appleton, Wisconsin. loves Wisconsin. There's a big tech campus at Lambeau field called title town tech. Okay. Man loves Wisconsin. He likes investing in Wisconsin. Love it. Love it for me. Love it for him. Uh, I've not yet been invited to Lambeau field.

1:18:41I'm just putting that out there, but I feel like it's two hometown boys. We could really vibe. So I asked Microsoft, Microsoft sends me the following statement. Uh, this is all they say our data center campus investment plans with the village of Mount Pleasant in Racine County are part of Microsoft's long-term commitment for the local communities in Wisconsin. We look forward to our work there. Other than that, we don't have more to say, nor are we doing interviews. So that's nothing. Okay. All right. Can I talk to anyone about how many jobs will this data center? It's a room full of servers. It's a one job.

1:19:15Microsoft data centers, they're around the country. You can see they don't make a lot of jobs and they know it. Kevin Scott, the CTO of Microsoft has a whole book about how data centers don't make a lot of jobs. It's a great book. He was on, again, on Dakota. We've talked about it he's like this is not the thing that is like an engine of job creation yeah but you need to have them and like then you build infrastructure and you have power grids and this helps local communities uh they're getting tax rebates and subsidies for it as always and mount pleasant and foxconn are like this is what happens when you build the infrastructure the clients will come and it's like no you guys were you tore down people's homes to build the tv factory where's the TV factory.

1:19:55Where are the jobs? Where are the jobs? Yeah. So we're going to be tracking the Microsoft data center in Mount Pleasant. I'm sure they're actually going to build it, but they literally, they field of dreams did. They just, if you build it, they will come just throw up a giant empty building and somebody will come put servers by it. Just to be specifically clear is it is declaring the land on which people's homes sit as blighted, tearing them all down, trucking water from Lake Michigan over there and building a power substation for no one to lie fallow for three years so that eventually Microsoft was like, yeah, sure, we'll put one there.

1:20:33Classic Field of Dreams. That's it. I mean, that's Field of Dreams, too. Just the movie. So again, we're tracking it. I don't know what to tell you. It is very silly. I think it is very odd that Microsoft isn't like pounding its chest. They're building a data center in southeastern Wisconsin. Like, they just don't want to talk about it. Neely, when do you run for mayor of Racine, Wisconsin? This is the only outcome here. I don't know that I could get my dad to vote for me, so that's going to be tough. You did swear once on TheVerge.com. You didn't like that. I did. My parents were not. I think I could get my mom.

1:21:13Okay. It's a good start. Just promise you'll never swear again. Would that help? I don't know that I'm prepared to make these commitments to the people of Wisconsin today. And I will consider my options at this time. While you're hearing from my attorney. We're not doing interviews. No interviews. No press. Sorry. No press. All right. That's it. That's a Verge cast. I promise that all the stories we talked about will be published. David will publish about Activity Pub. Yes. I will write about Wisconsin. I made no promises today. We did one last week. Yeah. I did one last week. I did. That one is a classical.

1:21:50Yeah. So I promised it and I delivered. I swear to God, this entire show is just for us to ideate stories put on the website. But that's why you love it. That's the Vergecast. Stuff on the website you should look at. We do have a retrospective of the Lisa going on, the Apple Lisa, the precursor to the Macintosh at the Computer History Museum. It's great. Go look at it. I really want people to read McKenna's story about the Donald Trump protests in front of the Manhattan courthouse and how everyone there was a streamer. It is one of the Verge-iest Verge stories we've ever published. It's very good.

1:22:18It's really good. And we have the same with the Home Assistant Sky Connect, which is another just extremely Verge story. It's so Verge. It's so nice. That's the range. And then take the color quiz. Whatever. David, do you want to tell people to vote for the People's Choice Award? Yes. So the Verge cast is nominated for a Webby Award for Best Technology Podcast. We're currently losing to a TechCrunch podcast. I like TechCrunch fine. They're all lovely people. I would like to destroy them and bury them in the ground with our votes. Please go. We'll put the link in the show notes. Please go vote for the Verge so that we can gloat to everyone we ever met that we own the Webby and they didn't.

1:22:54It's like a spring. Yeah. Yeah. The award itself is rad looking and I want one. So let's get it. Very good. That's it. That's for trust. Back on.

1:23:10And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at vergecast at theverge.com. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

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