Disney’s big bets on sports, streaming, and Fortnite

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Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of multi-stakeholder media companies. I'm your friend David Pierce. Neelipe tell is not here. But we all are, which is very exciting. Alex Cranzes here. Hi, I'm your friend who's ready to do a victory lap. Let's get it. It's come in. It's Katty Robertson here. Hi, Addy. We have a lot to talk about this week. There's a bunch of streaming news. Disney did just all the things. We're gonna talk about that. A bunch of vision pro stuff. This is like the first week that regular humans got vision.

And they got real weird. So we're gonna talk about that. Blue sky stuff. A bunch of other stuff will do a big lightning round. But let's start with Disney. Right. I feel like we have to start with Disney. I hate, hate, hate talking about earnings on the. It is my least favorite thing. But every once in a while, Bob Iger shows up. And it's like, what's up losers? It's earnings time. Well, technically, it's not just Disney, right? It's Disney and Warner Brothers Discovery. True. Okay. You're right. So within the Disney story, there are like somewhere between two and three.

And we have a lot of different visual stories. Yes. We should probably start with the sports thing. Right. That was kind of the big streaming wars news of the week. And Alex, this is where your victory lap begins. Tell us what's going on. Yeah. So what's happening is ESPN and Fox, which are both currently owned by Disney are. Yeah.

And we're stuck with Warner Brothers, which is not owned by Disney. Yeah. Currently give it time. Give it time are all coming together to make a giant streaming app, which is effectively what Hulu was back in like 2009, which is when ABC and Fox and NBC all eventually came together to make Hulu and like fund Hulu and put all their content on it. It didn't start that way. But that's where it went after like a year or two. And that's what's happening now. It's like Hulu for sports. And I said that right as the news broke.

And then as more came out, it was like, yes, I'm right. It is Hulu for sports. Yeah, you were increasingly vindicated. Yeah. So, OK, let me see if I understand this because we've gotten sort of bits and pieces of information about what this thing is, but it's it's a streaming service that is launching later this year sometime. It will have a name. We don't know what the name is. Warner Brothers is involved. So it will probably be stupid. But it will have a name. It's going to be a mix of all of the things that we're going to do.

All of the linear networks owned by those companies. Right. So like all the ESPNs, all the Fox Sports is ABC, all the TNTs of the world. TDS. And just like those full channels. Right. It's just like it is live television of those channels, sports are not sports. Right. Right. OK, because that was one of the big questions is like, is this just sports? Is this not? It's just it's just channels. Yeah, it's just channels. But it basically is sports. OK.

Right. And so it's going to be like it's going to be all of these different sports things. And then Disney is still saying they're going to do something with the ESPN as its own standalone, which has me wondering what the hell is going on with the ESPN plus, which I think you are one of the few people I've ever met that was like, yes, this is a rad service.

No, this is good. OK, you're explaining that this makes no sense, which is the thing that I have been trying to figure out is does this actually make any sense because all of that is there. Right. And then there's going to be. What I think amounts to like individual sports, right. So the stuff on ESPN plus the stuff that Warner Brothers gets through the bleach report, the stuff that Fox has streaming like all that will also exist inside of this Hulu for sports theoretically.

Thing. And that's that's it, right. It will have its own price. You can pay for it. But also if you want to watch all of that stuff on the other services that are also part of this you can. And a lot of that stuff will also be on cable because it's just the cable channels that you're getting in the streaming bundle. So what is this?

I think I think it's like a question. I think I hear a lot from my brother and sometimes from you and Neely, but you guys are much more technically savvy is streaming is really hard if you want to watch sports. Like my brother is constantly complaining because he thinks, okay, I have this sports service. That means I can watch the Cowboys anytime I want the Mavericks now. Now I can watch the Mavericks anytime I want.

And and until we like know it's black out. And it's really annoying. And he has to then go by another streaming service or he has to find someone who like can like stream just that one channel to him. And it's all stupid and confusing.

And this I think is going to potentially reduce that confusion. But not a lot because sports streaming is still a huge mess because every single sports like owner like NFL and everybody is selling their rights all over the place in all these different ways and like trying to put all of their eggs in every single basket. And it feels like this is kind of solving for that.

But you kind of not. Yeah, it feels like. I don't know, Adi, does any of this make any sense to you? Can you explain this as the resident sports lovers? The person who clearly knows anything about sports. I mean, this seems mostly it that is absolutely the impression I get is that sports is the great thing that streaming hasn't managed to do anything with yet.

Yes, which also I think means that there's more of a piracy ecosystem around it in a lot of ways. And I do wonder what impact that's going to have on this at a time when my sense is piracy and all the other areas that streaming once decimated has grown a lot. Yes. That's interesting. Yeah. I don't really pirate anything except off of Alex's Plex server. Totally legal.

But I have watched more sports than I'm proud of on like a TikTok live stream because I literally couldn't find anywhere else to watch it. I generally feel like if I try my hardest to find a legal way to watch something and there isn't one. It's no longer my fault, which is not a good legal argument, but it's how I feel about streaming. And often with sports. I'm like, okay, I pay for every single streaming service.

I can find that will show me sports and still there's like a one in three chance I just can't watch whatever is on you pay for life TV to right not anymore so I got rid of cable but this is part of the whole thing is like the only reason now to have cable. Is if you like sports because it is the one place that generally has all the sports unless you want like if you're big into like college volleyball.

You're on ESPN plus right but for the most part live TV is like the last bastion of it's just where all the things are which is very funny because now that's the biggest problem in streaming is there is no place where all the things are so we all just want cable again.

And there are also these smaller services that do live streaming that sports is kind of what they do like I think Fubo is one and sling TV is another one where like they still have all of these channels and so they've been making $40 $50 a month on people for just this and they're about to get a lot of what I think is the end of online live online TV I think it's probably going to be devastating for a few specific companies.

Like sling and Fubo yeah right I pay for sling exclusively to watch sports and I will stop now who is going to be fine right. Who else does live streaming at this point youtube TV is the big one now and YouTube TV has even made a big deal with it so you know the even made a big deal out of sports as the reason to have YouTube TV. Like, they got the NFL Sunday ticket deal. They paid a whole bunch of money for it's the core thing that YouTube TV is a sports package.

And increasingly, if this thing works and there are a million reasons to think it might not, like, did you see guys see the news today that the leagues were blindsided by this? Yeah. And I had no idea this was coming, which is bananas. And I feel like the FTC is going to be very busy with this soon. I'm curious why this hasn't happened earlier with everybody bundling together. The sports sports like someone making a really big play for a large live sports. It's because partially the leagues.

The leagues don't like the leagues want to control their rights. Their rights are super, super lucrative, which is why Google spent a ton of money to get YouTube TV and the NFL sports Sunday ticket. Sunday ticket. There we go. Sports ticket. Sports ticket. It's, I think it honestly begins and ends there. It is so expensive to have sports. And it is like the last thing that is that expensive. And I think it, but I think it spends both ways, right?

I think for a while it was like, oh, okay, we can use sports to grow our own thing. And I think it was when Max launched that they made a big deal out of Bleacher Report being part of it, right? They were like, we have HBO and we have Bleacher Report as if those things were like equals. And that didn't really work. And now I think all these companies are a point where it's like, okay, if you're trying to buy sports rights, which again, are the best way to win in TV, right?

It's to like if you, the NFL, you're going to have a successful television business. It's just how it works. If you want to do that, you either have to have tech company money because now Amazon and Apple and Google are all in this fight and they just have infinity money to throw at this or they have to band together and find a way to fight this because what the leagues want is they want their stuff to be everywhere, which is why they're also on broadcast TV.

Roger Gidele, the NFL commissioner just gave a long speech basically about how they're not going to ditch broadcast TV because that's how most people experience the games. It's like, that's true and it's going to be true for a while. So you either have to replace that unbelievable scale with some other kind of unbelievable scale, which I think each of these companies wanted to do. I know for sure Disney has been trying to do this.

They're like, oh, ESPN is going to be the thing and they're like, well, it's going to cost you like $100 billion. And I like one never mind. And so it does seem like kind of a sign of desperation out of these companies that they're like our only chance is to all do this together where else works. We saw that last year because ESPN has been looking for a partner for a while now. Yeah.

I had one over at Fox, which is part of Disney. They could have just like walked down the street and knocked on the door and like, let's work together. Come on. And I can say finally did. And then Warner Brothers who has very, very vocally like David Zyazov has been like, anybody want to do business with me? I'm ready to do business. Yeah. He's like, I'll buy you. You buy me. I don't care. Let's just let's answer chance.

And this like is a great deal for them because most of these, most of these big channels are owned by Disney. And a few of these channels are owned by Warner Brothers and now they've got like an actual leg into sports, no disrespect to Bleacher Report. They've got an actual leg into like live broadcast sports. Yeah. And that's huge for them.

And then these other two have some money bags over in the corner who are going to pay them more money and hopefully fund whatever massive lawsuits I guess they're going to deal with from the leagues and probably the FTC. It does absolutely feel like the kind of consolidation that the FTC right now is. It's going to be like, yeah. Do you think I've been going back and forth on this because on the one hand, it's just a thing they're all doing together, right?

And I think the case that they seem to be making to each other and to the sports leagues and to the world is like, this isn't a new product. We're just taking a bunch of existing things. Like one of the things I was reading made an interesting case that the fact that they are linear streaming channels and not some new way of disseminating the content is how they manage to do this without signing new deals with the league.

And I don't know if that's true or not, but I assume the case that they're going to make is this is okay because it's all, you know, stuff we were doing anyway, we're just packaging it differently. But I have our time imagining that's how it reads to be an icon or anyone else. We've just spent a bunch of time talking about the small streaming players that are going to get bodied by this. And that is just the biggest argument that that people could make. Yeah. I think that's probably right.

All down to Fubo Fubo and Sling TV are about to change the history of sports broadcast to get America. But wait, let's talk about Hulu because the you made the case when this is first coming out that this is Hulu for sports, which congratulations, you were precisely correct on that. We should also probably do a disclosure here. Let's see, Neil has not here. So we'll do it.

Comcast is an minority investor in box media through its subsidiary NBC Universal, which owns peacock, notably not a part of this, notably also owns lots of sports rights as does CBS and Paramount Plus. So lots of sports still not in this. We made a Netflix show. It's good. I had nothing to do with it. You all might have. It's a show. I did the interview. There you go. So Adi is wildly conflicted. Oh my god. Adi, why are you? I don't know. I don't know. Other things.

Alex has a black server of dubious legality. But we should just like, let's do a little bit of a retrospective on whether Hulu was a good idea. Because if you rewind a million years ago, it was sort of a similar thing, right? They were like, okay, Netflix exists. What we need is a way to take all the things that we like about broadcast TV on the internet. Well, they weren't even fighting Netflix. At the time, they were explicitly fighting pirates. Like they were there. Yeah, no, that's right.

It was torrents. Yeah. They were fed up with torrents. I don't know who does those. And they were super upset with it. And so they said, so I think it was like NBC Universal was one of the first ones was like, hey, it got with some private equity companies and made this deal. And then ABC and Fox, who at that point only one of them was owned by Disney, also we want to be in on this too. We want like a nice control way to get our stuff out there without having to manage like abc.go.com.

I'm going to move that one. I'm going to tell you. Yeah. And so they said, okay, let's all bundle together. Let's do it this way. And then CBS was like, if you guys were going to go do our own thing and eventually that became Paramount Plus, which is we choose not to reference CBS all access. Yeah. It's like it just went off and did its own thing. But everybody else came together to fight piracy. And at the time, Hulu was huge.

Like it was like the second most followed website after like YouTube or something at the time because people were really into it because they got all the stuff. And then everybody immediately started to like, bigger and fight because apparently when you have all of these huge egos and big companies in the room, all trying to work together, they don't. Right. Well, and I feel like that the other reason this is just Hulu again is it's that dynamic exactly.

Yeah. Right. It's I don't think pirates are so much the fight here. Like I really increasingly believe this is about like rights consolidation and making sure they can they can like continue to stay in the game together and build a sports thing both because it's what people want and because it's the only way any of them can afford it. This sense of like, okay, if we don't give people one place to come to do it, they will find other ways that are worse for us.

Yeah. Which is what Hulu was and Hulu really worked because it was like, oh, I want to watch Parks and Rec, which was just on TV. I can either go torrent it tomorrow or I can just go to Hulu tomorrow and everybody wants to Hulu because it was easier. Yep. It was like it was spotify in the music industry like same thing. But then it turns out that having three large companies own a company together goes badly. Yeah. And like, you know, who's been through this now is Disney.

Disney knows this better than anybody and is now willingly signing up for this again. Disney just screwed itself into paying like 20 billion more dollars to acquire the rest of Hulu from Comcast after all of this. And now it's just happily jumping back into bed in this exact same agreement again. It doesn't make any sense to me. I think it kind of makes sense. I think Disney has been facing a lot of existential crises with its various businesses, particularly broadcast TV, particularly ESPN.

And this gives them like a lot of opportunity to make some money back and make those businesses viable again, provided they don't get fully bodied by the FTC. Fubo, everyone else involved. I'm honestly, just be clear that no matter what the FTC does, the FTC also tends to have to go through the courts and the FTC has not a great track record with the courts right now. Yeah, they mostly lose. Yeah. So that's fair. That's fair. They'll get like bodied on Twitter.

Or excuse me, they'll get like bodied on threads, maybe X, possibly TikTok. I think Bob Iger will get over it. Yeah, I think he'll survive it. And speaking of Bob Iger, so let's switch to the other story here because I think the other thing happening at Disney right now is like Disney is both, I think, to your point, kind of in an existential crisis. It's been a weird couple of years for Disney. It's not growing as fast as it wanted to. It's not making so much money as it wanted to.

ESPN is still this like giant fountain of cash. Yeah. That now seems threatened. So they're trying to figure out all this stuff. And yet our man Bob Iger shows up to the earnings this week and has really like kind of feeling himself rolls out these big giant initiatives and it's just like, what's up everybody? Like we're still the Walt Disney company. Yeah, it was, it had like big Bob Capic energy, particularly because it was so like tech focused.

A lot of the stuff he was saying because one of the things is that they're going to have their own like persistent universe tied to Fortnite, which we don't entirely know what that means or what that's going to look like. We have a vague idea, but it's got Fortnite persistent universe and Disney involved. So that sounds like money and cool. It feels like that's going to work. Yeah, it feels like that's like a Bob Capic. That's the sort of thing he wanted to do, right?

He wanted to try to company into a tech company. And so this is like, okay, this is giving them some inroads and taking their like terrific IP and putting it out there in the Fortnite space and making those deals. And then you also have like, okay, they're going to start cracking down on Disney plus password sharing, which is another like tech thing where it's like, okay, no more free rides. Get out of here, which Bob did when he was like, no more free rides at Disney World or whatever he did.

And Bob Eiger was like, how dare you do that? That's so hostile to our customers. We love everybody who comes to Disney World. How dare you raise prices? But he doesn't love people who share passwords. Don't do it. Bob will hate you. Let's talk about this Fortnite thing because I think this was a surprise. In a lot of ways, Disney said they're investing $1.5 billion, I think, in Epic to create a persistent universe, as you said, tied to Fortnite. Again, we have no details on this.

But Disney and Epic have partnered a ton on stuff over the years. There's been all kinds of Marvel stuff inside of Fortnite. And my sense is this stuff is done very well and feels like in a lot of ways, kind of a natural place for Disney as a company to go, right? Yeah. The absolute first thing I thought was, oh, I kind of thought this had already somehow happened.

Yeah. So, I mean, I think what we've seen from Fortnite over the last year or from Epic, really, is this idea that they can take the thing that is Fortnite and the Unreal Engine underneath it and build it out into more stuff, right? They did Lego Fortnite. They have the racing game that I can't remember the name of right now, but it's very fun and everybody should play. And there's just like, there is a universe around Fortnite now that seems very powerful.

It also ties into, it seems like what they kind of want to be is corporate Roblox. Yeah. Roblox is incredibly popular. Roblox is also just the jankiest thing in the world. You go to a website and click on a thing and you find like a prison simulator made by a 13 year old. But I got some loves it. This is more, it is, they want to be a game full of games. And but it's these very well recognized IPs.

And it seems like if that's the goal, you literally could not imagine a better partner than Disney, right? Yeah. So is Roblox? Well, Lego was a pretty good partner. Lego's, that's true. Yeah, because I did Lego first, right? Yeah. Yeah. And Lego Fortnite by all accounts is doing super well. And makes sense. It's like, the thing I keep coming back to is like, I'm very old. Yeah. And so I play Fortnite like it's like a game for shooting.

Most people, especially younger than me, because again, I'm very old. Fortnite is just like a place to hang out. It's just like, do fun stuff. Yeah. And there's like, there are purely creative worlds in Fortnite where you just go to build stuff. And it's that Roblox is kind of the same thing, right? Like the being there is the point and like Disney World. It just is digital Disney World in so many ways. And I feel like Disney, I'm almost surprised Disney didn't try to do this itself.

But it seems like a big, big bet on who is going to win this race that it would pick Epic to go with.

I also think the scaffolding of a game, even if you're mostly hanging out, is really important just because we have seen at this point, two or three decades of things like MMOs tend to be really successful, even if people are using them to get married or hang out with friends, whereas things like Horizon, where the entire goal is, why don't you do the things you do in real life, but you can't actually get any of the sensory experience.

It seems like people just don't like, obviously some people use them, things like the R chat definitely have a base. Yeah. And I think it's a little less intuitive why you should get into them. I mean, my godson, I was back in Texas recently and that night he's like, I'm going to play Roblox with my friends. And we were like, all right, cool. And we went off to the rodeo. We came back that night and he was asleep.

We get up the next morning and he's like, my favorite game in the world is Lego Fortnite. The baby sitter showed it to me and now I'm obsessed. And that's all he plays now. Like it was just like an instant drug for him. And he was not a big Fortnite player. He was like Roblox fan. And he was like, it was just very clear, built that world, a given that thing. And then he could be like, there's my babysitter's house over there and Fortnite. And I was like, well, that's a little creepy.

But also I love this for you. And I love that she has the patience to play this with you because you're eight. Yeah. But it's like, it's a very weird, like, it's not weird, but it's just kind of how quick it is for people to just jump into it. And it feels like the Disney that's just going to be like huge. Yeah, I mean, yeah, having the pull of like characters you recognize and the storytelling that Disney is so good at goes a really long way.

But it breaks my brain to think about all of this because on the one hand, I think the two things that this says to me are epic is winning in some vague but real way. And also that we're all still betting on this idea of the metaverse being a thing. And I really thought we had just given up on that idea. Like, I've made so much fun of the whole concept of the metaverse for the last two years. And now I'm sitting here being like, this is an unbelievably good idea of course, Disney is.

I feel vindicated because I feel like it was not me who wrote this, but several people just said, look, the metaverse is just video games. It's just that we went through a weird period where a bunch of men and suits decided that we, what if it was video games, but minus the things that people actually like about video games? I feel like you used to make the point a lot that Roblox was the metaverse. And like Roblox was one of the biggest metaverses, right?

I think when Roblox itself decided it wanted to make that point. That's true. It ended up changing its name away from games. That's also I think kind of silly because clearly what people are doing games there. Yeah, that's what they're highly social. Right. I think we've gotten away from the idea that you're going to work in Fortnite, which is kind of what I associate the metaverse boom of the pandemic arrow with. So there's no like B to B Fortnite software.

And it's not Roblox told all its employees to come into the office because you can't work in Roblox. We try to work in Lego Fortnite. I'm down. I would try. I would try to. I would try to cast in Lego Fortnite. Yeah. Let's do a whole whole show in Lego Fortnite. We can do it. I'll wear my Raven meta smart glasses and we'll hang out in Lego Fortnite. It will be sick. So you're like, this thing works for you. You're in on this concept. I mean, not me personally, but it makes sense to me.

Okay. Why not you personally? Because I don't like being around other people. That's honest. Okay. I respect that. Yeah. I think this part of Disney feels like in many ways the biggest bet where like it's there's still very much calling Disney like the Disney plus company. Like it is the thing Disney needs to work. But Disney spent I think two billion dollars to do a gambling thing that will work because it sports gambling and it can't help but work. Doing great.

But this feels like in terms of sort of big swings with a lot of room for error and a lot of like monstrous room for success, the epic thing seems like it could be a big thing. Yeah. Because I feel like Disney when it comes to games has had like a very mixed run of things. Right? Like they've had some good stuff. They've had some bad stuff. That's true. Disney's not. I'm trying to think of the good game based on Disney IP and their stuff.

They've license stuff so you have like kingdom hearts and so many Star Wars games. All of the star they do exist. Right. But then they are they good and fun and exciting and worth playing. Yeah. Disney's also had like internal studios and then it's like moved away from those internal studios. I think under Bob Capick and it did some a lot of like heavy reorg. Yeah. With the studios and and so this is like an interesting almost like return to form for Disney to be like, oh yeah.

Games. And the thing I associate with weirdly most with it is Warren Spector's epic Mickey. Yeah. That's what I think. I think that's really cool. And absolutely massive financial success. No. But it was like that was the most Disney of Disney games, right? Like that was like any time I think of a video game of Disney I go back to him being like, yeah, you're going to paint your way like into the future with like Mickey Mouse. I just just remember symbolic of that period though.

And that was like the height of prestige triple A single player games. Yeah. And just Google best Disney video games ever just to make sure there wasn't like an obvious one I was missing. And we're looking at things like Castle Volusion starting Mickey Mouse from 1990 and quack shot from 1990 what like the track record's not amazing.

Yeah. Yeah. And so they've got all these terrific IP that they've been very good at selling out to other companies and now doing this with Epic and what seems like a good it's going to be a much tighter relationship. So I'll be really curious to see what happens there. And also if it explodes it's going to be like really interesting to watch. It's also very fun that this is one of Apple's best friends partnering with one of Apple's mortal enemies. Yeah. Which I just enjoy very much.

Like Bob Eiger and Tim Cook are going to have a lot of very polite, very testy phone calls over the next couple of years and I'm very excited about it. Yeah. It's going to be great times. I mean, Disney was a big launch partner supposed to be for the Vision Pro. Yeah. Yeah, you can go hang out. You can watch a movie like I think in Darth Vader's palace or something. It's I don't remember if it is that exactly but yes, it was Disney definitely Star Wars themed.

Yeah. I think there's one that's like on the volcano planet where he lived for a while. I know far too much about Star Wars apparently judging by both of your faces. Oh, no, I remember I remember those things I'm trying to remember because I went into the theater and I do not remember where it was. I wanted to say to Zerween. Was there always a tattooy that I know I don't know if there were others but there was definitely a tattooy. Maybe I just made up Darth Vader.

I want to watch a movie on Darth Vader's like thrown. It's a good idea. Listen, I know for sure Bob Eiger is listening to this podcast. So Bob, get it done. Make it happen. Come on. All right. One more thing before we switch gears and take a break here. I don't know if you guys saw but the the feistiest argument of the week on threads. Everyone's favorite feisty social media platform was about Apple TV plus at HBO. I just want to I just want to feel everybody out on how we feel about this.

So why are we wrote a story basically positing that Apple TV is the new HBO and that it's it is where you go to get basically nothing but very good things. They don't do that much but the things that they do are very good. And then Lucas Shaw who's a reporter of Bloomberg and very good and knows the stuff better than most.

Quote tweeted somebody saying something to the effect of anyone writing something like this should be required to say that nobody watches Apple TV plus and the feelings that that brought out in people on the internet people blocked about it people posted about it people got very angry at Lucas. Somebody called him a funny name that he then quote tweeted and it just became this whole thing.

But I think the question underneath it is like is Apple TV the one now like is it is it is it the best one is uninteresting. I mean here's a question if do you like science fiction. So like sometimes okay do you like weird modernist takes on historical women's stories. Yes. You adversely and do you like this. Ted last year. The accurate. If you like those three things then like Apple TV is great.

I think Apple TV plus is very much like HBO and that it has really high standards it maintains those really high standards and like HBO for a very long time nobody watched it. Everybody's just like we love to be like oh yeah HBO Game of Thrones Game of Thrones has huge. It's massive and a ton of people watched Game of Thrones. That was not normal for HBO. That was a surprise in a shock and a delight for HBO.

And also I'm pretty sure that like the Game of Thrones ratings would have been like a pretty bad episode of the Big Bang Theory. No, I just don't say a conflict between the two things you just mentioned. That's totally fair. Yeah. I think they were doing like 10 11 million average viewers for which was massive for HBO. And at the time for broadcast TV was like pretty okay. But you know you think about the mash finale or was it Grace.

My big one is Grace and Adamy season two was over 20 million people watching it. So you're like no. Yeah. 20 million people did not watch the latest season of For All Mankind they should have. I guess the thing that interests me about this comparison is that a lot of the way that I experienced early like prestige TV and HBO shows was through a critics ecosystem that doesn't exist anymore.

That a lot of the I think you've written about this that there was the idea that nobody's like not that many people are watching this show but every critic you know is watching this show. Everything on the internet is writing about it. There are these whole little ecosystems. I'm really curious what that looks like for Apple. Yeah. And I think Apple's been doing kind of okay with it.

That's one of the reasons it's gone so far into science fiction is because like you have monarch which is a big show that's based in the Godzilla world. And it does ask you to care about the Godzilla movies. You shouldn't. But it wants you to so bad. It wants you to. And the show is legitimate really good. I think it's got a great like time ahead of it. Same with For All Mankind.

But it doesn't really like they're not really hitting at the same kind of like pace that traditionally those critically acclaimed like shows like we don't have a television without pity anymore. AV Club is very, very different than it was 10, 15 years ago, five years ago.

And so you don't have those like conversations happening instead you have like people on TikTok going through and judging Emma Stone's favorite movies and saying why they suck which is like not particularly useful criticism or you have what is it you've threads and people making fun of Lucas for something he was right about like nobody watches Apple TV except for being David I think. Yeah, well there were a lot of people who responded being like well Apple TV plus has 25 million subscribers.

That's different than how many people yours. Yeah, yeah, they all watched Ted Lasso. Yeah, they did all watch Ted Lasso. And then they maybe watched. Did they watch foundation? Probably not. Severance. Yeah, they watched like an episode and a half and then like yeah, the only person in the world who watched all of foundation is Dan C for. And he's really had to leave the verge because yeah, that's why he's not at the verge anymore.

It's because we found out he watched all of foundation and we're like wow. No, but I think you're the point you're making about critics made me think of something which is that like even still like I think about a website like the ringer which is a lot of really good pop culture coverage. They sort of instinctively cover every new like 9 p.m. on Sunday HBO show because there's just an assumption that this show sort of matters, right?

Whether it's the white lotus or succession or any of those kind of handful of times a year shows that you're getting that true detective right now. Yeah, totally. And there's just a like cultural assumption that this show is relevant because it is like the Sunday night show on HBO. Apple TV definitely doesn't have that. Like I could not tell you what day any Apple TV show comes out which I think is like a meaningful thing. Was Ted Lasso Tuesdays?

I honestly couldn't tell you like the only streaming one in general I remember was the first season of the Mandalorian on Disney Plus came out Friday mornings and I had friends who would literally like wake up early in the morning on Friday morning to watch the show in order to like be able to talk about it at work.

And so like that's the level that you get to and I think HBO just sort of is granted that level of cultural relevance even if it's not real like we were just like in this up before we started and four million people watched the series finale of succession like one of the great TV shows that every critic on the internet was writing about which is like half the number of people who watch an episode of Chicago fire like everybody's 95th favorite TV show.

But nothing has hit that sort of cultural relevance that HBO just gets to have because it's an HBO. And I think Apple TV has a lot of good shows. I actually think like if you just took 50 random shows from any streaming service I would bet that Apple TVs are better than any random 50 on any of the street.

And that's what I mean that was like the kind of the core argument I think of that HBO piece the Apple TV Plus piece was that hey it like pound for pound it's it's hitting above its weight like it's yeah I think that's probably right. But it's also it's not doing true detective numbers it's not doing Chicago fire numbers and historically prestige TV doesn't do Chicago fire numbers that's why part of why it's prestige TV is because a lot of people say I don't want to watch that it's too smart.

It's too prestigious. It's too prestigious. I will say though and we need to take a break but criminal record on Apple TV Plus kicks ass I'm pretty sure it's not going to land the plane and it's not going to make any sense at the end but it's like five episodes in and they're all been great. I love this highly recommend but I might take that back anyway we need to take a break we'll be right back.

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All right we're back let's talk vision pro so as you're listening to this on Friday it's now been a week since the vision pro came out into the world we've got a bunch of news but. Adi I just want you to like describe the vibes of what you've seen from a week vision pro being in the world.

It feels like I've seen sort of three things one is everyone noticing all of the little annoying things about the vision pro that Neline and the rest of us noticed to is people going oh well I'm like a developer or I'm a person who is interested in technology

and this thing is a technologically interesting system both of which were I feel it kind of prefigured by our review yes the third is this thing is really expensive this is a cloud symbol agreed and that is the one I should have seen coming more than I did I think

I sort of took it as this thing is really expensive maybe it'll be kind of ridiculous and go to wear outside holy god was I wrong no man was I right you're still right don't it still go I'm right in the abstract I'm wrong actually power I mean what was it I

think I think Jake posted something on the site the headline of the quick post he did was just it's been 10 hours and this is a video of a man in his car driving while wearing a vision pro which like we knew was going to happen and we got a bunch of

cyber track impressed posts from people saying boy you guys called this and I kept being like this was not a tough call guys like this was what it was going to be but now we've seen we've seen people walking around the mall you see people on the subway like you're

totally right that being the person with this out in the world makes you interesting and I don't think that'll last but it's very much or yeah I feel like there are two ways this could go one is the iPhone which having an iPhone in the early days like if somebody

else had one you were like oh my god I don't the other ways I remember Google glass remember the period like the week or two where Google glass it was like oh this is so exotic all these models where it it's like this incredibly exciting sci-fi thing and it

looked a lot cooler than the vision pro frankly and then within a month or two you were getting banned from bars yeah no I 100% it's going to be that side because right now all the people doing it aren't using the vision pro correctly which was pointed out to me by

someone in our office who has a pro yeah if you're walking down the street with a vision pro on just like pinch pinching the air you're not doing anything yeah apparently you can only have one sorry apparently you can only have one window open and you have to hold it

like this all the time so theoretically the only way to actually your window like that and like yeah you got then you got so bad you like they're not doing it right you can only have one window at a time and he's like walking through the office showing us how to it

it works I was kind of hoping it would be like you wake up in the morning and you like walk to the subway just sort of leaving browser tabs behind you yeah and then you just pick them all up on the way home you just you come back out you put it on and it's like

oh cool there's all this stuff I had to do today like that sounds awesome that is super not how it works no I would just like to note also this is a thing that I have had many people mention about pass through is I am waiting some day this thing is going to crash while

you are wearing it it is going to be incredibly annoying to suddenly be blind yeah while you were driving right don't drive yeah don't be dumb yeah that's a good just quick PSA don't do that just don't don't do that well I think like when when when the Wall Street Journal

did theirs when Joanna did her her review and she did like a ski slope thing they just shut down the ski slope because they're like oh we can't have other people like on this slope with her and what she goes blind right into somebody can't have that happen so it's like oh

poor don't drive with it I like that Joanna shows up and she's like guys I have an NDA I have to do this separately and they're like don't worry we don't I won't anyone around you anyway yeah you're cool but it doesn't seem like the people have landed on the thing that we've

all been talking about for the better part of a year now which is like this thing is a television that seems to be overwhelmingly the takeaway is like like you're saying there's some cool technological stuff going on here in in certain like engineering ways this thing

is masterful and amazing kind of useless for a lot of things but holy crap is it a great TV watching experience that's like the thing I've seen overwhelmingly seems to be that which is driving me insane because it is a TV that I cannot use in the way that I would use a TV

because it is single user the single userness of this thing has been driving me just up a wall for a week yeah oh no I completely agree and I think mad like watching you I'm like I'm genuinely angry because I have so many electronics and I look I share them with a person yeah

and the point is we are both able to use this thing and I can't it's not just like oh it's fitted for your face or whatever it's you literally can't use the interface right it won't recognize your eyes yeah we we haven't all been using the lies review unit because we can't

right I mean you can start a guest like to be clear the thing that happens is there's one person who can own this thing it recognizes them you can start a guest session by pressing the button and then you have to do this like minute long calibration process of picking

colored dots out yeah and then it can recognize you and it can recognize you basically until it swaps back and then you have to start a new guest session so there is gets to be one designated TV user in the house that's it no one else watches TV everyone else has to spend

a minute getting their TV ready and I do think I I was less worried about this before it launched then I have become now I'm with you I think it's it's actually the single biggest thing missing from the vision pro right now is decent multi user support because if it is a television

and or a game console it's going to be a thing you pick up put on use for a bit and then put down right it is it is it like very much a an episodic device like all headsets are right now Chris great made this point on this show a while ago and I haven't stopped thinking

about it ever since I was like oh why aren't there VR games that are fun to play for eight hours and he was because like who the hell wants to play a VR game for eight hours like I think that's right and so the idea that I take off my headset and put it down on my

couch and the headset is the television and my wife can't then put it on is stupid like there are people who are saying you know it's it's lonely and you can't watch TV alone or you have to watch TV alone in it and I both think that's true and also kind of overstated

like a lot of people spend a lot of time watching TV alone I think that's basically okay yeah somewhere Richard Lawler is listening to this feeling very vindicated but uh this idea that it would be like no one else in my house is allowed to watch my TV ever

it's just that 50 yes well or like no one's allowed to use my PlayStation right yeah exactly so like rich rich multi-kid families you remember do you ever have friends like that when you were a kid and they'd be like oh this is my PlayStation my brother has his own PlayStation

what no I did not have this now why don't I have that why don't I have my own PlayStation than your parents be like because they cost money get out yeah go go mo the art yeah they'd be like go outside that's your place it's pretty easy to switch because every other entertainment

focused computing device on the market except maybe the iPad recognizes you're supposed to have multiple profiles I just like watching adiants so mad I was talking to Jake on our team earlier the fun of being in the office is like it's just randomly getting arguments with people

and he got very heated and was started was saying that we should start giving every iPad a zero out of 10 until they give proper multi-user support and I'm just like hell yeah dude like that's it's a stance let's go for it no multi-users are not like yeah I support this I'm into this

any other version pro stuff we should talk about I don't want to linger on this we've talked a lot I fix it did a big breakdown oh yeah and boy howdy is the pixels per inch awesome is it nuts yeah through the numbers 3,386 pixels per inch that seems high yeah it's it's only it's only a few

a few pixels less than what you would expect for like four like what 4k requires which is why it's not technically a 4k display but it's like but it's this big yeah it's back that is an inch and it has that many pixels on it is kind of insane do you want to give the quest three and the

the other numbers that were in our post yeah yeah useful comparison yeah and in by comparison the the meta quest 3 has 1218 ppi and in the ht vi the the htc vive pro has 950 and if you want something that you actually look at more than like once a day the iPhone 15 pro max has 460 ppi

so this thing is and they point out that pixels per degree is a lot of wins in some ways more accurate that's like the degree of field of view that right pixels because it had said it's like this thing where it just blows off a gigantic scroll screen to a gigantic field right but even those numbers

are also pretty good yeah it's like the numbers here are just outrageously high and you're like okay so this thing is like damn good yeah because the pixels per degree the vision pro is at 34 ppd which is lower than the 94 and the 95 ratings for the iPhone 15 from 15 feet away or no the

iPhone 15 from a foot away or the standard 65 inch 4k tv from 6.5 feet away so I guess low is lower number better here for the ppd for the pixel per degree higher is typically better I think that the point is that it is still not going to get you the kind of clarity that you get from like

looking at a very small field of view for a small screen but it is still I don't know that I have the numbers here but it's still pretty good for comparing it against other headsets yeah but it also makes pretty clear how hard a technical problem this is because I mean Neil I was talking about

this when we talked about his review is like the comparison to like blood cells which means nothing but it is it is technologically insane yeah that apple got this many pixels onto a screen this small and it's still not enough to do the thing that we need to do in order for the stuff to be really

realistic right like that is the scale of this problem is you can have that many pixels on that small space but because it's so close to your eyes and because it is literally trying to simulate reality the bar is just so so so high that even though apple has done like an order of magnitude

more than anyone else has been able to do we're still not there like it's just it the road for really making this up amazing is so long it's great so yeah a reason why pixels are just not the be all and end all of headsets like things like field of view turn out to be a really big deal with

the vision pro yeah yeah yeah it's been really interesting watching everybody go through I would say the kind of normal honey moon phase of a vision pro where you get it on you do the first couple of things you get the setup you learn how to do the pinch the eye tracking and it's like oh my

god it works and it feels amazing and then very slowly you start to notice like oh I can see the edges of of my vision here as I'm going and then oh the pinching doesn't really work and you just like slowly but surely the things that don't quite work start to creep in but everybody seems to have

that very first 20 minutes in the headsets where it's like oh my god I'm never taking this off this is the greatest thing that's ever happened that is also the impression that I feel like everyone who put on a VR headset in 2013 got yeah that's probably true no that's that's true yeah I was

talking to a friend who he did when when I worked with him we worked on the the original Oculus Quest review was it the Oculus Quest the Rift the Rift was the first the original Rift yeah yeah and we worked on the original Rift review and he's like wow I kind of called it like then I

said basically my review is a lot like all of the vision pro reviews right now and it's like look back yeah no he's he's right like like when you finally try really cool VR you're like oh wow this is awesome and then it kind of goes away which is why nobody talks about VR cardboard anymore because

that was really cool when you first put on like the cardboard and then five minutes later you're like okay what do I do now yeah I think a lot of this stuff is just a question of how long it takes to reveal its problems to you yes and the vision pro to its credit seems to take a pretty long time

to reveal its problems to you but right about the time it starts getting heavy and the battery starts dying and the gestures don't work quite so well and you remember you spent 300 or $3,500 on it everyone said while somebody has just been posting in all caps $3,500 and I feel

like this is now my legacy on the verge gas I'm very happy about it I think you mentioned Google cardboard I feel really bad for all of the people who spent a bunch of time making 180 and 360 degree videos I guess including us many years ago and Apple is just like no they're not good enough

you're not looking at them yeah which is look like potatoes which is wild because it's not like Apple is going way out of its way to ensure every experience you have in the vision pro is like perfect and sane and a lot of people are having issues with you know motion sickness and some of the

like problems with the ways that apps work and there are not that many guardrails except on videos that Apple doesn't think look good enough and I think that's kind of a silly set of guardrails yeah it's it's frustrating yeah especially that it's even just on the web like the web is the

place I think of as you should be able to just go and experience a thing even if the quality is not great yeah if I'm willing to go on to that stupid keyboard and type www.youtube.com slash 360 videos that are going to make me throw up like that is my right yeah this is the internet I should

be allowed to do that all right anyway we should move on uh before we get to the later ground one more than one and a half more things I want to talk about I'm holding giving Alex a half and we'll get to that in a second um blue sky opened up this week which I think it's interesting um this

is the the new twittery social network that all the ship posters went to and have been kind of hanging out in secret for the last year and now uh blue sky is open to everybody the j their CEO didn't interview with Alex he's talking about how they plan to make money and uh what do you what do

you guys make of this is like is blue sky do you know blue sky coming how I fully understood I didn't I hadn't looked at the website yet I was scrolling through threads and I saw a bunch of posts saying I'm on blue sky but I'll still be posting here on threads and that's how I knew that

blue sky had opened and I was like is it good if that's how I find out is just a bunch of people and threads saying I'll also be here also be on both posting on both yeah it's interesting you're on blue sky right I'm on blue sky I've I went to master on first I still use master on I've

slipped to blue sky just because blue skies felt much more low stakes it's interesting part of it was that it was private that it was just much smaller but it does feel like we're a bunch of a twitter people that I liked went and be it feels like I don't have to be contributing to a greater

social good which was the feeling I ended up getting from master on yes master on is very much like a NGO designed to make the world a better place through lots of developmental documentation which I'm sure is not true for absolutely every instance like all of the usual caveats I just

got the sense that I was like is this really a good enough constructive enough thing there were just so many people talking about you just you shouldn't be you shouldn't be cluttering up our timelines solve this frivolous stuff yeah and then I went to blue sky and drill was there it's

just all frivolous yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I will also decent amount of law Twitter and to top there yeah fair yeah I part of me thinks it's a success story if they all end up being their own things indifferent and I think the weirdest part is going to be the people who kind of commit to

posting everywhere and try to be the same thing everywhere I just don't think it's going to work and I think these things have all developed such different norms that like the vibe on blue sky is unrecognizable to the vibe on threads or on master on largely in good ways but mostly in just

extremely chaotic ways there's just a lot of people making inside jokes that you don't understand if you've been off of blue sky for more than 10 minutes but that's a good thing right and I think that part of the big bet that the social web is making right now that is that there can be

lots of winners and lots of things to come out but in some ways I think blue sky taking this long to open up was both the best and worst thing that happened to blue sky like blue sky has this very like mature vibe now right like blue sky knows what it is but the downside of that is it knows what

it is for this small group of people who have been there together alone like on a desert island for a year while threads became sort of the clear mainstream choice uh mastodon continues to be mastodon threads and mastodon are eventually going to be integrated and so it just kind of feels like

blue sky is just relegated to forever being an also ran yes I mean that's why I didn't I haven't account but I don't really participate in blue sky as much as because my brain can only handle so much social media and so I don't want to like I'm not going to be one of those people on a bunch of

different platforms and always talking and that one I was like I just feel like this one is he not going to be the big one I think a lot of really cool people are there but a lot of the really cool people they're all just text yeah and talk to them because they're my friends

on the other hand I kind of well a I do wish that they were much easier to have a single interface where I could at least check all these things yes at the same time that's very annoying to me but I also I don't know I hope we get more sites that are small and niche and that I can just go to for a

small subset of things blue sky in some ways reminds me of Tumblr in its post hegemonic era yeah and its current era where it's just like a couple of folks you know and they're being really weird that's great yeah tumblr's in the face where every time so many mentions tublr you go

oh Tumblr yeah and that is kind of what blue sky feels like already except that I guess one of them a last porn well you know I'm really curious how long it's going to last because I am just Apple and Google exerted so much pressure a few years ago in getting not safe for work stuff either

paywall or not paywall but like either walled away or taken down the blue sky getting on it feels odd yeah I mean to some extent I think you can make a pretty good argument that blue sky never should have opened up that main that that sort of managing and slowing down that growth was a good

thing for blue sky like it grew too fast in the beginning like remember people were hacking the invite codes and a ton of people came on all at once it became a mess like the norms changed people started doing weird stuff the platform started breaking in weird ways the health red ruined everyone's

life and there was I think a moment where they said okay we're gonna we're gonna slow this down on purpose and I think that was the right thing to do then and I think you could make the case it's the right thing to do now the problem is that runs against all of blue skies stated goals right which

are to build a social protocol for the web that is bigger than blue sky and to kind of reinvent the way that we do everything which I think at this point it lost right like we're we're in a VHS beta max war with with AT protocol which runs blue sky and activity pub which is underneath

mastodon which threads is gonna adopt and it almost doesn't matter anymore I don't think which one is better activity pub is gonna win yes it's just gonna win and I think if I'm blue sky you either have to look at it and say okay do we want to keep fighting this fight that we are now so far behind

or do we go like you're talking about and try to be something different and not try to build the next great social media company but like lean into this thing that we already are which I think could be very cool but doesn't at some point they have to make money yeah presumably and I

think that's gonna be a real challenge if they don't grow and I totally agree with you I think that's the one runs on like a patreon yeah you can get by for a pretty long time that's true that's our projects yeah I used to be taken for granted it's just things that could exist yeah

and there's a way to run this stuff as like an okay business that doesn't involve like if blue sky wants to be a trillion dollar company there are certain things you have to do in pursuit of that right but I think my hope is for the next phase of the social web that not

everybody tries to be a trillion dollar company that there are going to be lots and lots of much smaller ways to do this stuff fingers crossed and I think blue sky I could be totally wrong because there are a lot of things blue sky does really well and it's a it's a nice looking app everybody

on there's that's where drill is it's like it is the most fun social platform on the internet like I really believe that but it is such an unusual place now that I feel like if I had never been there before it would show up and it would it would feel very strange it also feels like a place

that you kind of can only really grasp if you were on Twitter yes but like but like on Twitter like capital O on Twitter and and God help you if you were one of those people it really is it's full of like decade old Twitter jokes that if you don't get you you sort of need a glossary to help you

understand what the hell is going on on blue sky yeah funny we'll see I I support all of this I hope blue sky works I just don't think it's going to all right Alex I'm so afraid to do this right now I have a piece of news about what's gonna happen I have a piece of break we have one more

sorry we should talk about for such a short amount of time shortest amount of time and in fact it says Alex be careful in all caps as some of you know I did make a bet with some people that at some point we would probably see a picture of Elon Musk in little Elon I don't I don't want to say any

other way I already hate this yeah and we're one step closer because they are currently dealing with a problem on the platform on X the platform where there is a non-consensual photo of a celebrity in the nude I mean it's drinks yeah it's like we can just say this like there's a

everyone on the internet knows this this is why this became a story it led to it led to X being the number one app on the Apple app store I want to just be very clear non-consensual nudes are not okay don't do that but also I hate how close we are getting to the big nude where I

win a bet I don't want to win this bet it's a terrible bet everyone loses that bet everyone loses when I win this bet clean up your act X like stop stop letting non-consensual stuff just be all over your platform that's not cool yeah well and that and then all this stuff we we were kind of

bookended with stories about the Taylor Swift deepfakes being all over X first there were there were non problematic non-consensual defects and now there's a deep fake of Taylor Swift in torsing on a Trump that's all over the platform X is just an odd odd place and yeah it's it's an

old kind of internet but not in a good way particularly if you like have any vested interest in X and don't want to be sued yeah yeah we're saying it reminds me of Reddit back in the mid teens during the period where they were extremely lost I fear yeah but at least Reddit would like say

out loud that they didn't want these things they wouldn't do anything about it for a long time but at least they would say we don't want this awful stuff to be all over our platform yeah you do not get the sense from the leadership at X right now there yeah well I think that Elon is definitely

operating in a landscape that comes after red it's clean up in which your yeah you can't even just say I don't endorse this but it's here it's like you have to have full-throated endorsement of yes the Nazis even though like yes he has condemned the Nazis he also just talks to a bunch of far

right people in spreads his own conspiracy theories and there's just a bunch of stuff that even though Reddit people like hung out with an invited the guy from creep shots into their events like they didn't end up doing that right yeah no I think that's right and it's just bad times

all around yeah just bad times I don't want to win this bet don't please I like I went from kind of wanting to win the bet because I like to be smug and win things to like I don't actually want to win this bet with Liz don't it's a terrible bet and also to everyone who is asking for

trending topics to be on threads you don't want that don't click on trending topics because something bad will probably happen when you do it yeah all right we need to take a break then we're getting back to letting around remember November 7th 2020 you had people discovering that Joe Biden

was going to win the election and just bursting out of their houses and going out into the streets and dancing and and making noise and hyping each other this was happening in cities across the country people were celebrating in a way you just don't

see anymore and and I thought that was an important moment to recall because it captured the joy that people felt about Biden winning which was not really about Biden's program people were just thrilled the Donald Trump was going to go January 20th it's going to be

twisted at the White House because we're going to get rid of the unspeakable twisted Donald Trump how people went from jubilant to totally jaded and how Biden could maybe win him back this week on today's splint all right we're back let's not talk about Drake's needs anymore let's do a laying around

Adi you go first what do you have so the FCC has a log in strobe calls and this is said you cannot have artificial voices do artificial voices include AI voices artificial you would think my instinct is yes and they agree good good for them nice they declared today that the that AI

generated voice clones in robocalls definitely do violate the telephone consumer protection act that means they can crack down on them this is partly relevant because the election season is heating up and new Hampshire has just released the results of an investigation about who was making

phone calls pretending to be Joe Biden its companies in Texas yeah his companies in my hometown okay you need to be less excited about this I mean I look anytime I see my hometown name like oh those are my people if you're not from like New York or like a big town and you

see like I'm from Fort Worth I see Fort Worth in a name I'm like oh cool and then I just just write for worth Texas like it's like a tiny town in Iowa I mean it's like a large city right next to Dallas this is so flattering thank you yeah I think of it as being a pretty pretty good look when

you're next to Dallas like they're always over there talking about how cool they are now you suck I see so we have some inferiority complexes over Fort Worth and apparently we also have spammers uh calling pretending to be Joe Biden and they were saying like don't vote right yeah you've got

to save your vote yes they can make any sense oh wow oh wow what didn't wasn't that a whole story in the last election cycle that there were there was a guy who was convicted of for posting on Twitter about like telling people not to vote making fake ads saying

you can vote by text message and telling people not to vote I think you were thinking of Jacob wall the troll who yes was doing Robocalls and Robocalls were yeah there were an issue in the last election they are obviously also just an issue as part of the overwhelming span that means

I don't answer my phone anymore same I tell somebody in an email the other day oh give me a call when you get a second they called me four minutes later and I didn't answer it's like I don't know this is a broad matter answer in the phone anyway so now AI has like it has a lot of things

supercharged this it's starting to become an issue and the FCC is that the very least recognizing instant issue and we probably will end up saying more about this this also seems like we're already kind of deep in the deep fake election in a very real way I just if you get a call and it's like

hello this is president Biden why would you ever believe that like I'm a Joe what's not dude they like that like that's just like whenever you get the emails that is like this is president Biden I need your help right now Alex but you would at least think that is a message he recorded right

now you wouldn't when you see those move on emails are you like oh my god Nancy Pelosi is actually emailing me David Pierce no you're always a stupid and not real okay you want the weirdest version of this though is that Eric Adams who you will hear definitely in conjunction with the

weirdest of anything yeah he does his own deep fakes like he had a bunch of calls where he auto translated his voice yes I remember that to make it sound like he spoke languages that he didn't I'm curious how that stuff is going to end up being affected by this I mean hopefully

I would assume it'd be the same way where they're like no that's not true I don't oh man what a legal mess that's gonna be can you deep fake yourself I don't I don't know I feel like maybe just don't do that kind of like it's so it's so like dumb because it's just like

Nancy Pelosi is not writing me this email Joe Biden is not out here calling me like at the phone at the phone banks calling me because do we do phone banks anymore is that really a thing anymore no maybe maybe you know ham sure but it's just dumb I'm just like who who is answering these calls

being like oh wow Joe told me not to vote well better not vote I mean I mean I mean the answer is forever more people than you think yeah but I'm just like what the stuff is this stuff is a mess and yeah we are only at the very beginning of what's to come Alex we got

my my thing is not about Joe Biden or my my home state okay or I don't care yeah never mind it's all dumb no it is cool because Ford Ford hold on I mean I must say forth again mm-hmm Ford worth Ford worth okay so Ford has been quietly creating a skunk works team for low-cost

EVs and that's exciting because cheaper EVs are good more competitors with Tesla will be good just competition in general we love that it is also did you all watch that show like all American I think it was called like the auto show oh yeah American auto American auto yeah yeah

it just feels like it was out of a storyline from that so okay let me explain to you what I don't understand about this Ford notoriously a company that makes cars yeah um you don't need to make a car company inside of your car company to make cars but you can just make cars yeah that's your

that's your thing it's like apples like what we created a skunk works team inside of apple to build smartphones it's like nope you do that already just tell them to make a different one yeah what is the I this what yeah I think my my understanding of it Ford is like it's illegal for

Ford to make anything other than F-150s so they have to create a whole new thing to make something else I suspect it was probably because a lot of the people working on this skunk works project the head of it is is a guy who is at Tesla for years Alan Clark but a lot of people working on it

are from this place called auto motive auto space motive space power I did a mp sure yeah I had to spell it out and and they acquired this startup last year and so I think it's probably just easier to hold them into a little company than a big company but still I agree with you it's like

you can just go tell your people to make you EVs like that just makes me think they call it a skunk works because somebody at Ford thinks that makes them sound like a tech company and what that actually is is just a team at your company that's just some people who work for you they're they're

going to go make a really cool stealth bomber that's the list look I think it's awesome I am extremely in favor of Ford and everybody else trying to figure out how to make cheap EVs because that dream seems increasingly dead all over the place now and like more power to anybody trying

to pull this off yeah it's funny like Farley the the CEO of Ford dead and earnings call after all of this came out tech crunch reported the story and said the Clark and the team at AMP slash Ford skunk works cheap EVs dot com whatever you want to call the place said this is a flexible platform

that will not only deploy to several types of vehicles but will be but will be a large installed base for software and services that we're now seeing at Ford pro I don't know what any of that means and I don't understand how this company is running and doesn't know that it's a car comes

somebody went to chat GPT and said listen dear chat GPT I run a car company like Jim far I say if I ran a tech company instead and they wrote that press release yeah Jim farley don't don't let chat GPT write your press releases in eight or just pull cars man just just make cool cars

make cheaper cars yeah take the things that you make and make them cheaper maybe maybe shorter right inside your company yeah maybe I don't need cameras to be able to see out of the front of my car listen it's weak and all drink I'm I'm gonna go last because we started on a crans victory lap

and now we're gonna take a day to victory lap what is it so the the information reported this week that Apple is developing quote at least two iPhone prototypes that are flip phones in their skunk works project that's probably not actually owned by Apple correct which is just they they take

all the people who work at Apple Park and they just tell them to make phones and they say you're a skunk works now and somebody raises their hands says what does that mean does it change anything and they say shut up we're tech company this is the future just go do it but there have been rumors

about this for a while that Apple was making these things and also a thing to know about a company like Apple is that they prototype everything like if you can imagine a phone of some shape or function or feature I I would bet you ten dollars there is one on a table somewhere in Apple Park it's

just how it works it's just what you do if you are a company this big that makes this many products but Apple like me thinks flip phones kick ass and it's gonna make some and I think it's awesome I love that and apparently also Apple is working on a foldable iPad which is the other dream

yeah like what a that's just like give me an iPad made it folds up and I can put my pocket like hell yeah that is also apparently being worked on this stuff is complicated we've seen flip phones they're hard and bad and have big creases and have their issues I still firmly believe this is

like the next thing yes and I think it's clear to everyone including Apple that smartphones need a next thing or they're just gonna be laptops they're just gonna be fine you're gonna have it you're never gonna think about it you're gonna upgrade it when it dies and that's gonna be it

and Apple has a lot of money riding on being able to get you to upgrade more quickly than that and I think foldables are gonna be that thing I think the only part of this that surprises me is that we aren't closer to the Apple foldable given historically their timeline of kind of like

following everybody else there's really a couple of years with with the exception of the vision pro they're usually only a couple of years behind everybody else and this one will be like five or six do you know my theory about this what they can't call it anything other than the iPhone

and you can't make an iPhone that is like a 1.0 anymore like they can't come out and be like it's a new thing it's called the iFlip everybody like no it's just a flip it's a iPhone like what are we doing here and so I think if I'm Apple I feel like I have to make an iPhone that is like on par

with all the iPhones we already sell which is now a 17 year old line of phones and so I think catching up to that is really hard because the flip phones require new components they require rethinking how batteries work there's some new software stuff you're gonna have to do like it's

hard work to do this well and I think in the way that Apple was clearly very comfortable releasing a vision pro that is not the thing they wanted it to be I don't think you get away with that okay with an iPhone I think you can maybe get away with that with an iPad I think if they came

out with a foldable iPad and we're like this is a whole new thing and people are like it's not perfect but oh my god it folds isn't that cool that I could see but I think the iPhone is too big and too important to everything that Apple is doing for them to be like here's a thing that's not

quite finished okay I that's my theory I guess I can see that the iPhone is also just your phone is a thing that you absolutely need to work in a way that you don't a bunch of other devices right yeah if like if my iPad sucks I just put it down like I if yeah no you're exactly right if I leave my phone at home life has fallen apart I had when I was it when I was in Vegas for CES I my phone just like broke one day and it was the most stressful like six hours trying to get all of that to work

again because I couldn't log in anything because I didn't have the two factor working I couldn't talk to my wife because we talk over SMS because she's on the pixel and I want an iPhone like it was awful and I had this moment of being like oh I'm way too reliant on my phone but that's just life

now you're exactly right you can actually feel your stress like I only sort of tangentially knew about what was happening with your phone but I could still feel the stress through Vegas oh yeah like yeah I about burned our hotel down with my anxiety like the moment you could also at what at point point you're like oh I'm feeling pretty good David must have gotten his phone fix okay yeah I had this moment of like okay I have meetings to go to I have things I'm supposed to do today I'm

not doing any of it because my phone doesn't work yeah it's like what is this world that I live in now with it like I can't I cannot leave my hotel room until my phone works again yeah it's not good it's not good but but you're totally right like the dad is that is where Apple is and so if

they're like here's the iPhone flip it might break but give me the iPad give me the I like that's my I got my little iPad mini I want to get rid of that thing I want to unfold I want to have in my back pocket I'm ready I've been waiting so long to upgrade my iPad mini which still has touch ID

and is like busted and is now old enough that some of the apps won't update anymore and I'm just holding out I'm like give me give me the thing Apple give it to me you're gonna have to wait till it sounds like 2026 is the earliest people are authorizing this is gonna come out but we'll see

I can't wait that long yeah I mean we've got new iPads coming probably pretty soon listen Tim Cook I know you're listening you're you're you're in a room with Bob I hear right now listening to this podcast just ship me one I won't even tell anybody just get me one it'll be fine

everything will be okay all right we gotta get out of here we've we've gone long as always yep we in Neilis honor it sounds like Neilis dead Neilis just gone for the day he'll be back everybody was gets very worried about Neili when he's not here I promise everyone he's okay he's

just I think on a plane being too ashamed of himself to use sufficient pro which I plan to give him a lot of crap for next week but we need to get out of here but before we do one quick thing uh we the verge cast are moving to the verges youtube channel starting next week so starting

with the show on Tuesday all of the verge cast episodes are gonna be on the verges youtube channel not the verge casts youtube channel we're still gonna use the verge cast channel for clips and all kinds of other fun extra stuff we're gonna do but if you want to find the full episodes

go subscribe to the verge channel if you're already subscribed hang out there I think you can subscribe to a playlist on youtube which we'll have for the podcast you can do that too it's gonna be awesome uh so do that smash them buttons whatever youtube were say I don't know uh and until then go listen to decoder case you knew it was on it for once it was a good decoder episode uh and decoder is all decoder is also now twice a week the verge cast is now on Tuesdays and Fridays instead of

Wednesdays and Fridays there's a lot of change going on all right but it's the verge cast we'll see you next time rock and roll and that's it for the verge cast this week hey we'd love to hear from you give us a call at 866 verge 1-1 the verge cast is the production of the verge and box media podcast network our show is produced by Andrew marino and Liam james that's it we'll see you next week hi we're visible ringing in 2024 with a two years resolution to help you save on wireless

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