How the future of sports streaming died
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Welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of qualified divestiture. I'm your friend David Pierce, and it has been a wild weekend here in the United States. We kept a lot of this episode sort of fluid until the very last minute, wanting to see what happened with the TikTok ban and with President Trump's inauguration. There's just a lot going on kind of minute to minute right now. We've covered a lot of this in the run-up to it, but a lot happened kind of in the span of 36 hours.

Or did anything happen in the course of 36 hours? So let me just level set where we are with TikTok kind of right this minute. TikTok went into essentially darkness on Saturday night into Sunday when the ban took effect.

That didn't have to happen. The rules around banning TikTok didn't necessarily mean that TikTok had to just shut off in the U.S. at midnight on Saturday night. But that's what TikTok did pretty performatively, I would say. The company put up a message basically saying, we think President Trump is going to save us.

It's all just kind of naked political maneuvering. Like, let's just call this what it is. That is pure politicking. But anyway, TikTok gone for a little while and then came back in a certain way. It's actually still not available, at least as I'm checking right now, midday Monday on either the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store. But.

But you can go to TikTok.com and watch TikToks. And essentially what it appears we've seen is Oracle and Akamai, which are two of the companies that host TikTok in the United States, basically seem to believe that whatever President Trump is going to do, it's not going to come back on them negatively. It's a risk to keep TikTok live right now because TikTok is technically banned in the United States and any company that hosts it or hosts it on its app store is.

can be fined. Trump has said he's not going to do that. It's still a risk, but the hosts seem to believe it's going to be okay. The app stores, TBD. Meanwhile, Blue Sky launched a video thing that looks a lot like TikTok. X launched a video thing that looks a lot like TikTok. Adam Aseri at Instagram said the edit app that the company has been working on for a while, which is essentially just a ripoff of TikTok's CapCut editing app,

It's coming soon. So all at once, there is this question of is TikTok going to continue to be around? The answer seems to be yes, in some way. Trump said at a rally on Sunday right before he was inaugurated that he has a big plan to save TikTok that involves making it a joint venture with the United States government, which doesn't make a lot of sense and doesn't have anything to do with the law that has been passed yet.

We are in unprecedented political times, especially as it pertains to the tech industry. So I frankly could not handicap the likelihood of any of this happening or not happening or how it might go down. But what I will say is,

Thank you.

But I kind of don't want to. And I think right now, again, as I'm recording this, we are in the middle of Donald Trump's inauguration speech. He is officially once again the president of the United States. There's a lot of stuff to come in the next few days. Trump has said to donors that he's planning to sign as many as 100 executive orders like today, Monday, and that there's going to be more to come with TikTok very quickly. So I think what we're going to do.

Just to bring this all the way back around to the Verge cast is we're going to talk a lot about all of that on Friday. I...

I promise we're not going to spend this whole year talking about politics, but this moment, a lot of this stuff is coming to a head. And I think this moment matters and is going to set up a lot of what's going to happen for the next four years. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and Sundar Pichai and Shu Chu, the CEO of TikTok, and Tim Cook and others are all at the inauguration. Joe Rogan, I saw a picture of him in church with Trump this morning. Like,

This connection between Washington and Silicon Valley is closer and different than anything we have experienced, and it is going to change a lot of things. But I don't think we know what they are yet, and so we're just going to try to kind of take it as it comes rather than having a lot of insane ideas about what might happen when I don't really think anything we've seen before tells us what's coming next. So...

Here on the Verge cast today, we are going to stop talking about all of that. And we're going to do two different things. First, we're going to talk to Jacob Feldman from Sportico about Venue Sports, which was supposed to be this like future of sports streaming app that died before it ever even launched. It went 90 on the Go90 scale.

at maybe record time. Like maybe we need to rename the Go90 scale, the venue scale. That's the thing we're gonna have to talk about. But he's gonna come on and he's gonna tell us the story and explain what happened and just sort of lead us through what this means for streaming, for sports and for the Go90 scale.

After that, we're going to talk to Kevin Nguyen about reading. So I'm going to do two things over the next two weeks, kind of about New Year's resolutions. And the two that I hear from people over and over again, people want to stop scrolling and start reading, like books and articles and like deep reading instead of just kind of aimlessly scrolling Reddit and TikTok or whatever.

So we're going to talk to Kevin about how he does that. Kevin reads more and better and more carefully than anybody I know and has also thought deeply about how to be good at that in a digital world. So we're going to just try and see if we can learn anything from how Kevin gets all of this stuff done.

We also have a hotline, lots to get to. This is a very fun episode and we are done talking about politics, at least for today. We're going to come back and try to make sense of all of this on Friday's show because I think with a few days of settling and a few days of the Trump presidency, we're going to have a better sense of where we really are. So we're going to come back to that. For now, we got other stuff to do. All that is coming up in just a second. But first, we got to take a break because I've been talking for too long and now I need to go not think about politics for a while. This is The Verge Cast. We'll be right back.

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Welcome back. All right. So the other thing that happened this weekend was that it was a pretty good sports weekend. There was a lot of good football. It's the college football national championship. It's the NFL playoffs. Basketball is kind of coming into full form. Like it's a this is a fun part of the sports calendar, but it's a crappy time to be a sports fan in a lot of ways because watching those games seems to get more complicated and more expensive all the time.

But there was supposed to be a better way coming already. It was going to be called Venue Sports, and it was going to be the one place you needed to be to watch all of your sports in one place. It was going to be pretty expensive, but it was going to solve a certain set of problems, I think.

And then it died before it ever lived. So I want to understand what happened here. So I called up Jacob Feldman, who's a reporter at Sportico, who has been covering this whole saga from beginning to end, which is both a lot of work and a very small amount of time because boy, oh boy, did venue come and go really fast. So Jacob is going to take us through what happened, what we can learn, and what 2025 might hold for sports fans. Let's get into it.

Jacob Feldman, welcome to The Verge Cast. Let's just start at the beginning of the Venue story. The story is both really complicated and not very long, so we're going to try to kind of tell the whole thing here. So go all the way back to the beginning and tell me kind of where Venue came from. Sure, Venue came out of nowhere, I think is a good place to start here. Last February, almost exactly a year ago,

it was, I think, an afternoon press release from Warner Brothers, Discovery, Fox, and Disney that they were creating this joint venture. We can talk about what that means. To launch the service, didn't have a name, didn't have a CEO, didn't have a price, never had a price. We'll get to that. And everyone was kind of wondering why,

Yes.

It was really, it was that vague that it was just like, this is, we knew the three companies and we knew that they have a lot of sports. That was kind of it. Yes, right. And obviously everybody knew that sports and the way we watch sports is changing and these companies are figuring out, they're constantly having these carriage battles, they're constantly fighting.

debating moving to streaming or not moving to streaming. Every company is a little bit different. And this was maybe going to solve some of those problems and not others. And maybe each company had slightly different priorities. I think that all contributed to the vagueness of it. And we got some answers over time. Some, again, questions maybe we'll never completely know.

so put yourself in the the shoes of of these three companies and let's see it was it was warner brothers discovery espn and fox right were the three disney espn yeah disney espn exactly yeah what what do you think like rewind six months before that what do you think these companies saw in each other that was like this is a thing we can do that'll work yeah i think that you saw something slightly different i think fox the simplest one to start with here because fox does not have a streaming service they have they've

Tubi, I think. So it's a free service. They don't put their live sports there. And so I think they were looking for a way to reach fans who don't have cable, who don't have

antennas in some cases. And so looking for a streaming service, streaming partner, I think that's what brought them to the table. Then you go to Warner Brothers Discovery. You guys talk about them a lot on the show. David Zaslav is always... We're big fans here on The First Cast. Huge fans for some reason. And he's always clearly looking for ways to continue to monetize, to balance the balance sheet, to...

look for ways to make money off the rights they have and potentially continue to gain rights. Obviously, at the time, again, going back a year, they still had NBA rights and were still negotiating for NBA rights. We can talk about how that played out. And so I think they saw, oh, another service

Another place where we can reach fans, a slightly different price point, ideally, we're in. And then you get to ESPN Disney, which is the most complicated. We'll probably spend the most time talking about what they're doing and why. And for me, I think what probably brought them to do this deal is they're at this crucial moment for ESPN. ESPN, long the dominant sports broadcaster in America, is

is reaching, it's still the dominant sports broadcaster in America, but slightly less so, a lot more doubt and uncertainty about what its future looks like, how people are going to watch. And as we enter 2025, I think what we're seeing is that they're going to try a lot of different things over these next years, these next couple of years. How much do you want to pay? You want to spend $5, $50, $500? We'll have an ESPN package for you. We see tech companies do this all the time, right? And so I think they're trying to figure out exactly what that looks like.

the ability to partner with these other companies, try something a little different, I think said, yeah, we'll sign up for this and see where it goes. Okay. So knowing what you know now, this was not going to work. Spoiler alert. Didn't work. Yes.

Did you think this idea made sense when it first happened? Like, just to lay my own cards on the table, I thought this was going to work. There were problems that we should talk about. But this, as a theory of the case about, like, here is what sports fans want and might be willing to pay for, this tracked for me. Did it track for you? I thought this was going to work on a much smaller scale than I think some people either anticipated or feared. Okay. I think...

Again, once it became slightly clear what this product was, which was going to be a monthly streaming service, roughly $30 to $50 a month to start, probably going up after that.

And including, like you said, all the sports channels from these three companies, which is a lot of sports channels. I think depending on how you do the math, it's like more than half of the major sports would be available here. So again, what you're getting is most sports for slightly less than you would pay for cable. And in my mind, you're... When you put it like that, that's not very compelling.

In my mind, the audience is either somebody who needs all the sports and is willing to spend $80 to $100 a month, or somebody who needs only some of the sports and wants to spend $10 to $20 a month. So again, this kind of middle product...

I think probably would have maybe gotten a couple million subscribers, something like that. Obviously very seasonal. When you talk about the college football audience, maybe they're signing up to watch their teams in September, October until their team's four and six and they're churning out. And so it would have been marginal. And that's what always... I'm curious kind of what your reaction was. Because to me, I still am kind of surprised at how much interest there was in the venue story given that kind of middle-of-the-road nature. Yeah, I think...

To me, it pokes at the right thing, right? Which is that watching sports... There's a problem here. Right. Watching sports is a disaster. Like, it has never been worse or more complicated or, frankly, more expensive to watch all the sports you want to watch. I think, like...

If you want, even if you want the NFL, right? Like if I want to watch all the football games, that's like four services that I have to pay for. At the beginning of the year, I calculated about $800 to watch every NFL game this year. That's nuts. Like that is bad. And I think for all of the stuff that we're going through in this like unbundling and rebundling thing, like we're just doing cable again. And so I think the idea that we could do cable again,

but mostly for sports would have worked for me. And obviously, I think the main limitation is what you're saying. It had something like half the sports, right? It didn't have any of the things that Comcast had, which turns out to be a lot of things that a lot of people care about, like the Olympics. It didn't have some of the football because Amazon had football and Netflix had football. And CBS as well. Right. And CBS was probably the biggest single holdout. It had college basketball. It has more football. Masters. Right. So,

Like, if you could have put together all of the things, this thing makes sense. And I think people would pay slightly less than cable for all of the sports. I think there's an actual market for that. But the more it became clear that it was half the sports for slightly less than the price of cable, it kind of started to fall apart. But I still think...

There is something you could do with sports if you do more than just the games that could be interesting.

And this is where we're going to go back to ESPN, which is trying to very much be that thing that we should talk about. But that was the case, at least in my head. It's like I can see the glimmer of something here. Right. And I think one of the questions right away going back to when this launch was, all right, who's in this? You know, it's Fox, Disney, Warner Brothers adding up all those channels. And then who's not in this? You know, you have your NBC, you have your CBS, you have your regional sports networks, which we can talk about too. And yeah, I think I totally agree that the excitement was based on

the recognition that there is a problem here. Maybe this will solve it, even though the past hundred attempts to solve it have not worked. Maybe this is the one. But yeah, even I could do the math and say, okay, this is $45. And then what is it? $7 for Peacock and then $6 for Paramount to get the CBS and then 15 for Amazon. I'm already paying that anyway. And so maybe I can bundle this together and say 15 bucks a month, which would be great. I'll do it. Which then we get to the fragmentation every year. People in the sports world now celebrate this thing called the sports equinox.

which is one of the nerdier things that we do in the sports world. We don't all hold hands and go full Midsommar, but on one Monday in October, all four of the major men's American team sports are playing. And so that was a good occasion. I think this October, those games plus some golf were spread across 39 channels and services. Oh my God.

Yeah, so this is why I actually think the part of the reason for the excitement behind Venue was less about the reality of what Venue could even possibly be and more just the recognition that thank God somebody in charge understands that this sucks. Excuse me. Flipping the remote and signing it a million times. Right. And I think what we've learned is that the leagues, which in theory have...

the most weight to make some of these changes. Like, if the NFL just wanted to sell all of its rights to one player and everybody would be happy, it could do that. It's never going to do that because there's more money in selling it to more and more people all the time. That's how Netflix gets games on Christmas, right? Like, that is where we're headed. And so, our only hope as fans, it seems...

is for somebody on the other end to figure it out for us. And as somebody who just doesn't want to admit that it's impossible, and it might just be impossible, there was something about Venue that was like, okay, at least this is somebody with some power pushing back in the right direction of this. Is this where we can introduce the Fubo character? This is where we bring in Fubo. Because Fubo said, no, thank you. Well...

A little background on Fubo, and I know you've covered and written about them too. So they started, they turned 10 this month, and they started in January 2015 with the same problem in mind. Watching sports online sucks. How do we make it better? And

For nine years and 11 months, that was more branding than product because their service ended up looking very similar to every other service that's out there. It's 100 channels for 100 bucks, more or less. They just had some clever UI stuff around sports, which was fine and good. But yeah, they were essentially more like a YouTube TV competitor than an ESPN competitor. Exactly.

This announcement comes out. We're talking about our reaction to this news. This was their reaction. Wait, what? We've been trying to do this. We've been trying to get your sports rights to offer a sports specific package to fans for literally 10 years.

And now you guys are going to team up and do this yourselves and compete against us? Absolutely not. So within two weeks, their lawyers were quick. The announcement was February 6th of last year, the lawsuit February 20th. And that was basically the beginning of the end of NU Sports.

Describe Fubo's case just sort of at a broad level. Yeah, so I think there's mainly two issues, both legally and in the court of public opinion that they raised. The first is obviously this cartel question of aren't these competitors? They bid against each other for rights. They theoretically...

You have to keep costs down because cable companies could theoretically only offer one or the other. Again, that doesn't really happen. But in theory, these companies should be competing against each other. Why are they now teaming up? So that's one. And then two is...

They never let us do this. You know, we wanted to offer a quote unquote skinny bundle, which I don't know if we need to define or if we'll get to in a minute. But this idea of only offering a sports package is something we wanted to do. They always said it's impossible. Now they're allowing themselves to do it. They're kind of self-dealing in that regard. They're not allowing us to do it. So those are the two main arguments that Fubo made. And pretty immediately, it seemed that people who were paying attention thought this was

this was a very good case that Fubo had. Yeah, it's interesting. I honestly, again, maybe this is because I know of the Fubo backstory, kind of saw this a little bit of sour grapes at the beginning of like, oh, here's some competitor that's being run over by the bigger companies who's

hoping court will save them. We've seen that story a million times. It usually doesn't, it usually doesn't turn out well for the little guy. And so maybe, you know, this is, this is a good underdog story in sports in some ways, but so, so I do think initially, again, I don't have a legal background. That was kind of my first read on this. Whenever I kind of see a lawsuit against a new thing coming out, it's just somebody trying to slow down a competitor. But yeah, I think as you mentioned, as soon as we started to hear hearings, as soon as there were experts and, and legal witnesses kind of weighing in here, um,

There did start to be some sense, and I think this even was true of the venue operators. At first, they were like, oh, you know, this is something we're going to overcome. We're still planning to launch six months after the announcement. And then as that launch got closer and closer and the courts, you know, denied motion after motion to dismiss, then I think eventually, and maybe it took even longer than that, they woke up to, okay, maybe this is an actual problem. Yeah, do you think what happened essentially is somebody...

I think that's basically where they landed. I think...

ESPN, again, the biggest player here when it comes to sports rights, is launching their own service this year. And so it was always a little confusing. They were going to launch this venue product last year and then their own direct consumer service, again, does not yet have a name. They like to take their time with these things, evidently. They're calling it Flagship, which I feel like they're going to launch it. I wanted to mention this. They kind of stole that from you, no? Is The Verge going to bring a lawsuit? They did. That is true. And we will be the flagship podcast of sports entertainment for as long as it is necessary to be. Don't worry.

Good, good. Yeah, they're calling it Flagship internally. Can I give you my pitch for the name? I don't know if we can get to that. Oh, no, I'm ready. Hit me. Okay. You've heard of ESPN2, ESPN3. Yeah. I think this should be called ESPN1. So it's all in one. Ooh. No, I don't think it's been used before. You obviously have Apple One. I think there's some familiarity with the concept of one. Oh, I actually really like that.

Do you spell it out or do you do the number? Spell it out, I think. I think that's classier. I think so, too. And you do it in the font, so it's just ESPNONE. I kind of like that. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You got some, like, win one play, you know, for the marketing. Yeah. So I'm putting that down now so that I can sue if they do go with it. Yeah. TM, TM, TM. Yeah. Jacob owns this. That's very good. Yeah. Okay. So ESPN has been saying forever that it's going to launch this thing soon.

I want to get in a minute into what that thing is because it is also sort of slightly amorphous. Because some people are like, oh, wait, doesn't ESPN have a streaming service called ESPN Plus? Which they do, but it offers a very small slice of what you get otherwise. Right.

Right. And so, yeah. So let's come back to that in just one second, because I think the what is the landscape for sports fans now, I think, starts with ESPN. So let's come back to that. But yeah, so if you're ESPN and you're Disney or even if you're David Zaslav and Warner Discovery and you're really focused on Max and trying to grow that stuff.

Yeah. It sort of makes sense that you would look at this and be like, this is way more hassle than it's worth. Let's just pull the plug, right? Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so, yeah, Max, as you mentioned, they launched the sports tier, I believe, last fall, which was free for a long time. I think it now costs extra. I'm not entirely sure. I can't say I've watched a ton of Bleacher Report on Max, if I'm being honest with you. Yeah, I have. I think, I don't know if I'm the only one, but...

Yeah, and again, this kind of brings us back to Fox, which has the Super Bowl in two or three weeks. I think they would have loved to have had a streaming service that you signed up for tied to the Super Bowl. They would have loved to lock you in for a year to watch Super Bowl. And they're kind of back to the one that doesn't have a sports streaming service, and we'll see what their next move is here. But yeah, I think especially when you're looking at Warner and you're looking at Disney, they got a lot of other things going on. Let's just move aside. And so...

Fubo, we can kind of move this in whatever you want, but Fubo signed an agreement with those three companies to drop its lawsuit earlier this month. And for, I would say for 24 to 36 hours, the venue hype was back on. Everyone's like, okay, this is happening. We were hearing on background that

venue was going to launch it was maybe going to launch for march madness or the nba playoffs uh and then 36 hours later uh again it went out the way it came in with a press release from the three companies saying actually we're good uh venue is no more yeah well there's one other thing that happened to fubo that i think is interesting uh which is that they made this deal with disney can you explain what's going on there i can try yeah so as part of this

multi-faceted agreements that included dropping the venue lawsuit and included a payment of more than $200 million to Fubo as part of the legal settlement. It also included a multi-faceted merger between Disney and Fubo that will see what I'm calling new Fubo, but other people are calling Fulu, is that Fubo will take over

control of Hulu plus live TV, which is another service we have not discussed at all, but has been around for quite some time. And that, again, is more of a YouTube TV competitor. It's 100 channels for $100, more or less. It's like the second fiddle to YouTube TV, right? YouTube TV is kind of winning the cable replacement wars, and Hulu with live TV is in second place. Very importantly, it is the second fiddle. And so last year, I don't know if you felt this way, I felt like YouTube TV had won

Whatever this race was for virtual cable, YouTube TV won it. There was a PlayStation View moment. There was a Sling moment. I don't know if DirecTV Stream ever had a moment, but it has always been there. But by last year, YouTube TV had Sunday Ticket, very importantly. It had very good ease of use. And it was YouTube. Everyone knew it, trusted it, whatever. And so I think...

Disney saw that and said, that's not good. If the future in five years is there's only one company distributing cable over the internet or at all, and it's Google, suddenly we're negotiating with them and they could cut us off. We need a better competitor. And we have this Hulu thing here, which has always kind of been off to the side in the Disney streaming universe, the live TV product. And, and,

the Hulu Plus Live TV. There's actually a space between Hulu and Plus, unlike ESPN or Disney Plus, which don't have a space. It never made any sense. So this is a kind of a chance to fresh start. Fubo, why don't you run this? We'll take 70% of this new Fubo company. And why don't you try to compete with YouTube TV? And importantly, probably most importantly for Fubo, we're going to let you launch that thing you've wanted to launch for 10 years, which is a sports skinny bundle, which they are at work on now, planning to launch it as soon as they can.

So that

strikes me as actually a pretty big deal. And I think all the machinations here got so weird that I think people got confused. But I think, like, Fubo is very powerful at this moment now. And I think it kind of has... There are a lot of ways it could fumble this opportunity. But it does feel like... I mean, Hulu with live TV grew very much on the back of sports, right? Like, they had that whole ad campaign that was just athletes being like, oh, Hulu has live TV. Hulu TV has live sports. Over and over again. And I think...

And, you know, the YouTube TV folks say that the main reason people come to YouTube TV is for live sports. That's why people that's why they went out and spent all that money for Sunday ticket. Like, that's still the reason people want these services. And for Fubo to now be able to a be a meaningful competitor cable, which I think it is now and be be able to do, if not like full venue, then like kind of venue like venue light.

Yeah, or even Venue Plus, arguably. Because they are going to... Again, we'll see what the product looks like. They'll have a chance, potentially, to bring in your local sports network or some of these other networks as well. Your MLB TV or what have you. So they even have a chance. It's exactly like you said. I think suddenly these leagues and distributors are looking at Fubo as exactly what they wanted to be looked at, which is a tool here to help distribute games. Yeah, we've added a real sports competitor to Fubo.

just not the one anybody expected or meant to launch. It's a very strange outcome that Fubo is kind of the only survivor in this fight. It's really, it's something. These are huge companies we're talking about. Huge tech companies, huge entertainment companies. And this is a startup that launched basically with international soccer rights 10 years ago. And now here they are. And maybe they're going to be watching sports in a couple of years. It's truly, truly crazy. I will, the one other thing

working in its favor is I do think the YouTube TV price hike in December, they announced they're going to raise prices by 15%, which I think was $10, one of their biggest jumps yet. I think that was a big wake-up moment for a lot of people saying, oh, maybe we should try to see if there's anything else that we can use as an alternative here because otherwise this could run away from us. I mean, it just is cable now, right? Like, it's not even...

but cheaper. It's just cable, but easier to cancel. And that's not nothing, right? Like it is meaningful that it is easier to get in and out of those things. Easier to cancel, easier to watch anywhere you want. Unlimited DVR. There are nice things about it. I think you mentioned this earlier too. One of the things I pushed back against this idea that like sports is, watching sports is worse than it ever was, is it is so much more available than it ever was. And I think we take that for granted that 10 years ago, a lot of these things you couldn't watch online

or you could watch very expensively, or you had to put a satellite on your house. These things have gotten a lot easier, but they've also gotten a lot more expensive. So that's where it sits. It definitely cuts both directions. There is more stuff you can watch than ever, for sure. But those things are in more places than ever. And so I guess as a sports fan on balance, I'll take that trip. Yeah, sure. I'll pay all your stupid prices just to watch your games.

But because now I can. And that's something. But the league's problem is a lot of people who aren't yet sports fans are saying, I'm signing up for what? I'm signing up for 40 years of being jerked around between 12 different services. And no, I'm just going to stay on TikTok and catch the highlights. Right. Yeah. I'm going to I'm going to watch ESPN's social accounts, not ESPN's cable channels. Speaking of, let's let's talk about what's coming this year, because I think other than that whole.

saga of last year. I think one of the big stories for me of 2024 was that it is now abundantly clear that all of the tech companies are all in on sports. Uh, Apple is in, Amazon is in, Google is in, Netflix is in, like these companies are spending real money on sports things that matter, that people care about. And Netflix keeps like sandbagging itself, but it's, it's lying. Netflix cares deeply about this stuff. Um,

Then you have this sort of lingering possibility of whatever ESPN is about to launch. What do you think is coming this year? What's 2025 going to look like? Are we just waiting around to see what this ESPN thing is? Is that kind of the big unknown at the moment? So I think, like I said, if 2024 was this year of we're all on YouTube TV and we're all on these services, I think 2025 is the year of

sports streaming getting pretty weird in a few different ways. I think we're talking about these skinny bundles. We just saw DirecTV launched a new product called MySports last week, which again is this kind of skinny bundle concept where you're getting 20 to 25 channels. Fubo's going to launch theirs.

Would not be shocked to see YouTube TV try to do something like that whenever they get the ability to in their agreement. So we're going to see a lot of these services, and then we're going to see these companies, Warner, ESPN, launching their own things. And then we're going to see Amazon, like you're saying, Amazon and Google continue to build products for sports. Apple continue to build products for sports. And so it's going to be messy. It's not going to be clean by the end of the year. It's going to be messy. But I think, as you said, ESPN is going to be at the center of what that looks like. Right.

What do we know about ESPN's coming service? What is the size of that thing going to be? So yeah, ESPN flagship. ESPN 1, TM. ESPN 1, TM. Almost certainly launching before football season, probably with a different name.

Again, we can start with the price. They haven't announced it yet. My bet, if we're putting money down, and this is sports, so why not, is they probably find a way to start this at $20 a month, whether that's a discount rate or lock you in or whatever. Longer term, they're not going to want you to know how much you're paying for this. They're going to want it bundled in with your phone bill or your Disney bundle or whatever.

your life insurance or whatever it takes to get you paying for this. I mean, I remember when Disney launched Disney+, they had all of these wild promotions that if you signed up for a year at the very beginning, it was much cheaper. And then it just sort of slowly, steadily got more expensive. But then they started to bundle stuff in. So yeah, I think you're right. It's going to go exactly the same way. And that playbook worked out well for them. They're going to bring that back. So that is what it's going to cost. That's what it may or may not be named. So what is it going to provide? So it's going to provide everything that

that ESPN sees. The ESPN empire from coast to coast, its live rights, its studio programming, the company is very committed to launching or relaunching its app tied to this so that

your fantasy is going to be in there. Your betting is going to be in there. Your shopping is going to be evident. This is going to be in their mind, the, the everything sports app. Um, they want to, you know, they, they launched this where to watch feature last year, which shows where games are on outside of their networks, which is kind of new and different. They want you to be the place to,

you go for sports, you know, forevermore. It's the where to watch thing that I think strikes me as the most interesting because I think you're right that you can sort of see the pieces like ESPN bet continues to grow and it's fantasy stuff continues to grow. And the idea of

putting all those things together and sort of making them speak to each other better makes sense, right? Like that seems fairly clearly where it's going to go. But ESPN also seems to have this idea of being like the TV guide to all sports, even the ones that aren't on ESPN's platforms. Yes.

super interesting and good and powerful idea if ESPN can pull it off. I actually think the where to watch page is fabulous. It is such a good, useful thing that should have existed a very long time ago that's just like, what network is this game on? But I can't imagine everybody being psyched about me wanting to watch an MLS game on Apple TV and first going to the ESPN app in order to do that.

And we've seen this before, even with like the TV guide like services, like Netflix doesn't want to play along with those services. So it doesn't really give them data. Lots of these things don't like, does ESPN even have a real chance of pulling this off in a meaningful way? It's a good question.

And I will say ESPN is not the only one that wants to do this. As you mentioned, you know, I think Amazon sees itself as the hub for sports. YouTube sees itself as the hub for sports. Fubo sees itself as the hub for sports on down the line. For me, when I am trying to figure out what's on or what channel it's on, like I go to Google and I think Google knows that. And I think Google is thinking about that opportunity, too. You know, if they can link you out to these services and collect a fee when you sign up, etc.,

So it's going to be challenging. Again, as much as we might all want this kind of one place, this hub, whatever, it's a very, very far away. I think we're probably 10 years away from Amazon and Netflix and Google all giving it a go, seeing where things shake out and then consolidating back into one place. But in the meantime...

Yeah, I think there's an information aspect of it that they can provide. They can tell you it's on Netflix. Netflix can't stop them from telling you that. And then it's just a question of how willing ESPN is to send you to other places. Yeah, and I think it makes sense to me that ESPN would be willing to send you to other places, actually, just because that stuff is so...

right? Like ESPN is just not going to get the NBA rights. It doesn't have for a long time. And so if you're ESPN, you can either bury your head in the sand until a decade from now and then try to win the rights. Or you can say, okay, we're going to get people here to bet and then we can have them go watch somewhere else. And as long as we are the place they come first, we win. But also, you know, who wants to be the place people go first is literally everybody else. Right. And so, and this has been the thing with streaming in general forever and is like, again,

again, I come back to like what users want is so clear. And I think the ESPN's where to watch page really worked for me because it is, it is that thing. I should go. And it's like, here are all the games on and here's how to watch them. That is, that is a thing that ought to exist. And it's ESPN does like a medium job of it, but it's, it's great that it exists at all. That's what I was going to say. Yeah. All these things, again, go somewhat like venue. They have half the things you want at a cost slightly higher. Apple sports, I think is another example of this, right? They launched an app for the first time last year. It's a big step in this direction. And,

It still doesn't have golf and tennis and NASCAR and F1 and Olympics are on down the line. You know, I think even, uh, I think when I talked to ESPN in August, September, I think they had like 300 leagues in where to watch and they were still getting requests daily from fans and also from leagues be like, Hey, why don't you list our, uh, mid American conference volleyball games in here? People want to watch these, you know, why don't you list our minor league baseball on down the line? So it's,

The simplicity and the exhaustiveness of these hubs is always going to be just that at reach. Yeah. So where do you think that leaves us as sports watchers for the next couple of years? I mean, I think on the one hand, like you said, there is more to watch than ever. And in many ways, the user experience of watching those things is better than ever. Like we're kind of past Amazon not being very good at streaming football games. We're like, it's most football games you want to watch on the internet are available and they're there. They might be expensive, but they're pretty good.

Is that as good as it's going to be for a while? Like, is the rest of the landscape going to get really just messier before it gets cleaner here? That's as good as it's going to be. And like you said, I think buffering and delays was a big problem. You know, we saw obviously with Netflix's first time out. Every time a streaming service is launched, you know, their first live sporting event, it usually goes pretty poorly. Bleach reports crashed when they tried to launch a golf event five years ago. Netflix almost crashed entirely when they tried to put Jake Paul on.

on. So I think now we've seen almost, I think maybe all of the players have those moments. It's reliable, right? Yeah, you do have to search where the game is on Google, but once you find it, once you go there, once you pay, you can watch, usually. You know, we can get into regional blackouts and all that. But that is working. I think all these companies want to make these games more interactive, where you're talking to your friends inside the stream. I think

For the most part, that's more trouble than it's worth. But yeah, the idea of putting the game on if you want to, finally, I think for a lot of people is a reality if you're willing to pay the cost. And maybe we should, you know, take a moment to celebrate that before we complain about everything else. Agreed. It costs a million dollars, but I can watch every NFL game that exists. And that is something. So, yeah, shut up and grab the popcorn. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

who do you think is the sort of player to watch this year? I mean, I think to me, ESPN is both like the biggest name in this space and also the one that might have the sort of single splashiest plan for this year. But like,

I don't know, suddenly Fubo strikes me as a really interesting company to pay attention to as a sports fan. Like I have, I have never once in my life watched Fubo and I, that will, I'm sure I suspect change this year. Uh, is, do you have any other bets on like who you're really paying close attention to? I think this is going to be the year that Amazon really establishes itself in sports. They're getting, they're getting the NBA primarily. That's the biggest thing. So starting next NBA season in the fall, it'll be on Amazon. They're going to take over this in-season tournament, the NBA cup. Um,

um as kind of their their crowning uh rights there thursday night football continues to grow they had a playoff game just this this year so i'm counting that as part of the year of amazon sports going back to the hub conversation they've been involved in the regional sports network side of things you can now subscribe to the regional sports network service for a certain number of markets and it's you know blah blah um within amazon i i think i wouldn't be surprised to see you know them launch some sort of

whether Fubo is in Amazon or ESPN service is a discount for Prime, you know, whatever. I think they have the unique position where they can monetize this from the Prime membership perspective and from the advertising perspective, which is what, you know, you've heard people who follow Amazon have heard this a million times, but I think that model is going to be the way forward as sports look for places where they can reach everybody and make money, which for a long time has been

bit of a, um, a balancing act for, for, for sports leagues is we can be on TV with our traditional partners, Fox and CBS, but we're going to get more money if we go to a zone or, or one of these other subscription services that, or even an Apple who are going to put us behind a paywall. Um, and so I think Amazon maybe is going to find that, that middle lane here, uh, where everybody's happy, uh, including the folks who are spending a lot of money. Yeah, that would be, uh,

That would put Amazon in a really fascinating position because I think the one thing I've been learning recently is how far ahead Amazon is as an ad business from most of the other streamers, which I think I underrated for a long time. Like what you're saying is Amazon can afford to pay all of this money for sports, not just because...

it's a giant company that can just, that just throws off cash from other things. Like AWS pays for it. That's fine. Exactly. But also they can actually directly monetize this in a way that most of these other streamers can't. And so they're in a position of like, this is not just a bet on other parts of our business that maybe you'll come for the Olympics and subscribe to Peacock, which is like a very real thing that Comcast did. They're like, we can come and maybe you'll subscribe to Prime, but also we can make real money off of this. And that becomes

I think pretty hard to compete with if Amazon can really pull it off. And so that's Amazon and that's games. And I think everything outside of games, I'm looking at YouTube, especially once we figure out whatever this TikTok situation is. I think all these companies that are looking to reach young fans are putting more on YouTube, you know,

Not that long ago, these leagues were mad at YouTube for putting up highlights, and now they're desperate to get their highlights on YouTube to be promoted to get the YouTube creators at their games. And so I think YouTube also has a really interesting offering. Obviously, Google knows how to sell ads, too. I think they have a really interesting offering to leagues as well. Yeah, fair enough. I think the shift towards everybody just being happy about highlights is one that we are only beginning to figure out.

Like I watched a surprising number of soccer games in those 10 minute extended highlights. Sure. And I don't know what to do about that as a sports fan, but it feels like a change. Yeah. All right, Jacob, thank you for coming on. I appreciate it. You're going to come back when ESPN1 launches and you're going to gloat about how you were right about the name. It's going to be amazing. My victory lap. I'm looking forward to it. All right. Thanks, man. Thank you so much for having me. All right. We got to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about books because here on a podcast, it's time to talk about books.

We'll be right back.

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Delta Concierge will make you feel like a travel pro. Go to DeltaUnlocks.com to learn more about the future of travel with Delta. All right, we're back. So like I mentioned at the top, we're going to spend some time this week and next week talking about tech ways to do New Year's resolutions. And I think if you look across the world,

Two of the biggest New Year's resolutions are some version of I want to get in better shape. You can take that kind of as broadly as you'd like to. And I want to read more. And I think I hear particularly from people is I want to take the time that I spend on my devices and point it at better things. I want to not instinctively open Instagram or TikTok.

which who knows where that'll go in a few weeks or Reddit or whatever else. And I want to do something fulfilling. And I think reading a book is, is just kind of the perfect version of that. But there are actually lots of things to do that are better than those things, even on your phone.

Kevin Nguyen, who is our deputy editor, has been thinking about this stuff for a long time. He actually wrote a story at GQ a bunch of years ago about how to read more with a lot of tips that I have really enjoyed and used over the years. So I figured I'd have Kevin on to talk about how he gets so much reading done, how we can all get more reading done, and how we should think about reading books in an increasingly digital and screen-based world. So let's see what we can do here. Kevin Nguyen, welcome to the show.

How's it going, David? Where are you in the world right now? I have not seen your face in person in a long time. Tell us about your setup right now. Yeah, well, it's 8.30 a.m. where you are. It's 8.30 p.m. where I am, which is Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, better known as Saigon, and I'm

Talking to you through my very crummy Wi-Fi connection at the Airbnb. Amazing. And you've been there for like, what, almost two months at this point? You're like, this is a real trip you're doing.

Yeah, who let me get away with this? Unclear, honestly. Yeah. My partner and I have been here for a couple months. I was doing some reporting in Tokyo, which was fine, and actually ended up accidentally helping out with some reporting in Seoul, because that's when we landed there. Sarah Chong happened to be there, so we were hanging out, and then it happened to be martial law, so...

That was supposed to be my vacation week, and I ended up editing Sarah, although those pieces turned out to be a lot of fun. If you guys haven't listened to it, Verge Gas listeners, Sarah Jong went to the martial law protests kind of drunk because we were drinking makgeolli before she showed up. Kind of drunk seems kind. That's true. Well, it was so cold out there, and she just apparently sobered up while she was there. So that's real dedication. That's real reporting. Yeah.

100%. Truly one of the weirder, like, 48-hour spans in Verge history. But it was good stuff. Yes. All right. So I brought you here to talk about reading because you are the person I know who reads the most and I would say is the most somewhere between adamant and snobby about how good books are and that people should read more books. And it's January. Lots of people want to read more books. And you...

In addition to being adamant and snobby about reading books, I think have like a good strategy for how to be a normal person in the year 2025 and actually read books. So I just want to talk through that a little bit and see if we can help some people. Does that sound good?

Yeah, I'm totally with you. It's funny, like January being like the new year, new me thing. Everyone kind of like wants to read more. Everyone wants to get back to the gym. I think there are kind of like some exercise discipline things that can help you read more. But actually, in the grand scheme of things, I sort of reject the idea that reading is like exercise. Oh, interesting. Tell me more.

Um, I think people, I mean, everyone wishes they read more. Um, but I think a lot of it is, it comes from like a self-improvement idea. And, you know, I think there's a little bit of just like, oh, I wish I spent less time on my phone and more time with my nose in a book. That makes sense. Uh, it's probably just better for, for your eyes for one. Um,

But I think just this thing, too, that just like, oh, like reading is exercise for your brain. And I think there's like some truth to that. But I think if you only think of it as that, as kind of a self-improvement medium, I don't know. I think you kind of miss out on the richness of reading and also the enjoyment of reading. I agree with that. Yeah, the idea that it is...

sort of a punishment to be endured because there is something good on the other side is also and it's the same thing people say about exercise, right? That like the actual way to succeed at this is to learn to enjoy the thing itself. And that actually the thing itself is enjoyable if you do it right. And that if you just do an exercise that you like and you're going to exercise a lot more and actually that's better than just beating yourself up on based on somebody's idea of a good workout because you think you'll feel good at the end of it.

Yeah, 100%. And I do think like the, like emotionally, I think the thing that exercise and reading have in common is like, I think it's actually kind of hard to like, make yourself sit down and open a book sometimes, especially after a long day, especially like, when, you know, streaming services and video games are kind of like, easier to just turn on and put your brain into. It's sort of like exercise. It's like once you get to the gym, you know, like the feeling is

changes very quickly. And I think everyone knows that. And like, you don't have to wait to get like a runner's high. It's like once you're in it, you're in it, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree with that. So I think there are sort of two kinds of reading and you just alluded to both of them. I think on the one hand, there is the like, I am going to sit down and read as like a long activity, right? Like I'm going to curl up in a chair and pull a blanket over me and read for hours. And then there's the like,

I read three pages while I'm sitting on the toilet or like waiting in line at a coffee shop or whatever. And I want to I want to kind of differentiate both of those because I think you have interesting ideas about both of those ways of thinking about reading. But let's start with the like curling up in a chair with a good book with plans to read for hours strategy. Like, do you do that? What's your what's your setup for how you do that?

Well, I just want to say like, that's, yeah, clearly the most enjoyable way to read or really do anything. You know, it's just like, oh, it's nighttime, you're curled up with blanket, you have like a glass of whiskey, you have a big book you've been excited to read. A tremendous experience if you can somehow manufacture that on the regular. Do you manufacture that on the regular? Like, do you carve out that time? No, I think it's kind of impossible. Okay, that actually makes me feel better. Yeah, I think, you know, like,

if you have like a family, if you have a life, it's just... And I guess that's the other thing. There are like ideal circumstances for reading, sure. But if you only read when the circumstances are ideal, then you'll never really make it a habit. You'll never really be disciplined about it. And I think that like anything else, getting into a good habit requires...

Just like a little bit of discipline and just a little bit of cleverness and a little bit of just like letting yourself off the hook every once in a while. Okay, fair enough. But in your in your ideal reading scenario, are you a are you a Kindle guy? Are you a print guy? Are you like print out the PDFs and read them with a with a marker in your hand? Like, what is your ideal reading scenario? Yeah.

Yeah, it's funny. I'm actually like all of the above. I think, you know, if I'm going to have that magical situation where I'm in the chair with the fancy whiskey. Yeah, I think a print book is the thing that's easiest on my eyes for a lot of reasons. And

That would sort of be ideal, but I read probably 50% digitally as well. For this job, I print out a lot of things and highlight and mark things up. Okay, but wait, just before I let you off the hook on, I do all the things. I want you to rank them for me. So there's print book. There is giant loose leaf pieces of eight and a half by 11 paper. There's Kindle and there's iPad. Rank those one to four for me.

In terms of like, you're going to read for 90 consecutive minutes. Ooh, okay. I'm really not trying to like elude it, elude the question because I think it does depend on the medium. Like for example, I think iPad is my least favorite of those four. I actually think the way you listed them, print book, loose newspaper, Kindle, iPad is my ranking from like best to worst. Okay. I still like them all, but I actually love reading comic books on an iPad. That's actually like kind of ideal for me.

And I don't know what it is, but I tend to retain more when I read in print. So I think there's kind of, that's like just what the spectrum is for me. But I, again, I really think they're all valid. I think actually, uh,

I do consider listening to audiobooks like reading, but I would put that at the bottom. Yeah, that's fair. I think I agree that I actually don't want to dwell on audiobooks for too long. I realized I was preparing for this. I was like, should we talk about audiobooks? And I was like, that is a rabbit hole. I am not prepared to go down. But I agree. Audiobooks are awesome and more people should listen to them. But it is slightly different in a way that I have not yet quite figured out. But when I listen to a book and when I

look at a book and read it, it does feel slightly different, but I think they're both okay. Different strokes. Yeah. You want to listen to books, listen to books. My sister listens to audio books and is, has read more fantasy books than anyone I've ever met my entire life and remembers every single thing about them. So kudos to her. Uh, where do you get your books from? Uh, both digitally and in print. Are you like, you get a lot of books for work, so we'll, we'll throw those out. But when you're like going looking for books, what are your, do you have good sources?

You mean like as a discovery method or where do I buy them? As a discovery method or even just if you're like, here is the secret to buying books for cheap that no one else knows about. Yeah. Well, the secret to buying cheap books is to buy used books. True. We do a lot of eBay in our house and we actually try and read a lot of stuff that's out of print for some reason. So sometimes that's the only option. But eBay is great. And then I think, you know, occasionally I'll buy e-books off Amazon, although sometimes

bookshop.org, which is kind of the indie online retailer or the online retailer that represents all the indie bookstores is great too. And they're launching their own ebook service pretty soon. So I think I'm going to

move all my reading there uh if you shop on amazon no judgment but it's just what i choose not to do um and then yeah i buy a lot online from uh or pick up from my local indie bookstores so in new york uh books are magic green light bookstore and you and me books nice i the the one like great local bookstore near us just closed uh i've only been to it a few times and i found it like it's

Like still slightly more devastating than I expected to, to walk in and they're having like a 50% off sale on everything because they're just going out of business and really kind of bummed me out. But I also bought a bunch of books for half price. I know. I was going to say too, I, I, there was a time in my life where I was a lot more diligent about just like reading reviews and like just a handful of publications, uh, just like really being up on what was coming out. And somehow it would still go to, you know, McNally Jackson, uh, and just like,

The display tables would have tons of fun stuff that you just never heard of or never think to pick up. And I don't know, that perusal experience is still really valuable. And actually, I don't know if folks have been to a Barnes & Noble recently. They got kind of taken over by private equity and they kind of have rethought all the stores to be smaller.

And they're actually much better now. So if there's a Barnes & Noble near you, there's a good chance it's been sort of like revamped and the booksellers there are great and

I don't know. It's kind of funny. As someone that recently rewatched You've Got Mail, we used to think of Barnes & Noble as the big bad. And clearly, Amazon's the big bad now. So now we're out there supporting Barnes & Noble like it's the little guy. Yeah, Barnes & Noble is comparatively like the mom-and-pop upstart bookstore. I know, right? I mean, that should just show you how big Amazon is. Yeah, I agree. So, okay. So all the way on the other side of the reading spectrum, you are also a big proponent of

reading books on your phone in tiny bursts, which I think to like a lot of reading purists out there is, is like blasphemy. Uh, why are you such a, why, how did you become such a believer in reading in the books app on your phone all the time? Yeah. I just think, uh, once you get into the habit of it, it's, it's immensely satisfying. Um, sort of, you were laying out earlier, there's like the two modes, there's like the, you know, I, I also think there's like

between these two things. But yeah, like sitting in the fancy chair at night and with the blanket. And then I think, you know, just like the three minutes you peel off and you're like on the toilet or whatever. That time accumulates a lot, you know? And you can just, especially if you commute on public transportation, like the easiest way to

Just read is on your phone there in line for coffee. And I think it also depends. I usually kind of break out the types of reading that I do. I would say also I'm someone that like usually reading two or three books at the same time. Usually I'm reading fiction and print because I just like need to concentrate a little more on that. But I think a nonfiction book is a little bit easier to read.

quickly. Obviously depends on the kind of book, but that's the stuff that works really well on the phone. And just like, yeah, reading nonfiction in like three minute bursts, I think is actually quite satisfying. I don't know. And I think it's kind of, it's like a little bit part of my strategy that like when they want to read

I like have a couple different options that will kind of appeal to like the mood that I'm in. If I'm like really ready to settle in, you know, I'll probably do the novel. If I just like want to read for 15 minutes, probably just the nonfiction book. If I really like don't know what I'm in the mood for or like I'm thinking about playing video games instead, I'll play video games instead. But like the comic books on the iPad are also like a great option too.

Yeah. Okay. So talk me through this rubric a little bit, because I think fiction versus nonfiction is an interesting way to think about it. But this question of like, what is a good sort of three minutes at a time book, I think is actually a really key part of trying to figure this out. Because for me, the problem I've always had when I've tried to develop that habit is I'll read...

I don't know. It's like a like a Lord of the Rings is actually a book I tried to read on my phone. This is years ago, but I still remember this so concretely. I would read it on the subway. I had like a 17 minute subway ride from my apartment to the Verge's office. And I would I would read Lord of the Rings, but I would open it up. And every single time I'm like in the middle of a scene. So I would have to back up a few pages, remember where I was. And by the time I'm caught up.

I'm there. So I'm like, I'm just reading the same six pages over and over and over trying to remember where I was. And I had this moment of being like, OK, this is clearly the wrong kind of book to be reading in these sorts of increments. But how would you like delineate what makes a good phone book versus what makes a good like you need to read this in in sort of larger, more concentrated chunks kind of book?

Yeah, that's a good question. I do think that like, yeah, fiction, nonfiction is a pretty clumsy way to divide it. I think you can kind of tell like there are types of books that require certain kinds of concentration. And I would read those off the phone, usually. And then anything that you can kind of breeze through is great for the phone. You know, I think what you're talking about Lord of the Rings where the scenes are long, that's probably a tough phone read, even though I think a lot of fantasy and genre stuff works really well for the phone, especially fantasy.

thriller is a romance. I did read The Da Vinci Code on my phone, and that's actually a perfect phone book because every chapter is like four pages long. So you just like burn through two chapters. It moves really fast. And then you're and then you're out and you pick it back up where you were. So like that, that's the opposite of the thing I was just talking about, I guess. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, the genius of Dan Brown and a lot of thriller writers is like, I think they cap their chapters at like a thousand words or fewer even. So you can

in five minutes, read an entire chapter. So like you just have a self-contained unit of thing. You're never jumping off in the middle of something or coming back in the middle of it if you kind of time your stuff right. So yeah, obviously perfect phone books. Yeah, I think the commute is just such an interesting like unit of time because it's both very distracting, but also I think on people's commutes, like all they want to do is distract themselves from everything that's around them. Maybe that's a New York subway thing, but...

Yeah, no, I agree with that. And I think I'm thinking about a lot of like a lot of the books that I end up reading for work purposes are like somewhere between kind of journalistic nonfiction and like self-help. Like I just read Cal Newport's new book, which is basically all about like how to be better at work and not lose your mind on the Internet. And it is sort of it's it's chunks of.

helpful information at a time. And that to me is like a perfect phone book because it's like each one of those things is helpful and I go through and I highlight it, but it's kind of just like a bunch of articles in a row. And that, that feels good. Uh, whereas a lot of these other books that I end up forgetting where I am, if I haven't read it in a couple of days is like, that's the wrong thing to read on my phone, I think.

Yeah, I think it also becomes like pretty hard with fiction to jump in and out of a scene in particular. Because you just like kind of, you know, with I think a nonfiction book is generally like, kind of like guiding you and kind of telling you what it's about.

in most cases at all times and remind you and then in fiction you know like i think it often literary fiction is like trying to destabilize you or confuse you for effect uh and it's probably working and it's probably not a great effect on the subway yeah that's very fair uh

What apps do you use for reading on your phone, either just for reading or for like book management stuff in general? One of the things I was going to ask you about is if you're a person who like tracks all of your reading in any specific way. So like what's your reading set up on your phone? Yeah. In terms of tracking, I actually I kind of go in and out of tracking what I read. So I'm trying to be better about it in reading.

like 2025. But I don't know, I kind of don't keep track because I used to like, there were times when I felt like I needed to like keep up a certain pace, especially for certain kinds of research. And I've been out of that for a while. So I don't know, I read a lot of my own, so I don't need to motivate myself in that way. But you know, I actually think this, there's so many like apps to track things. It's just like, the best thing you can do is just keep track of things in like your favorite notes app, like

Like just don't overcomplicate it. It doesn't need to link to anything. The more rigid the thing is, I actually think the less likely you are or the more likely you are to like fall off of it. So in terms of apps, again, I'm actually like pretty unsophisticated. I read a lot in the Kindle app. I actually send a lot of files to the Kindle app. There's like a super janky beta get app.

files onto your Kindle via email? I have said to people for years that the one job in the tech industry that I'm interested in is going and being the product manager of Send to Kindle and just make it. What if you just made it good? What if it was you could just take a link and send it to the Kindle and then read that article in your Kindle? Like, what if that worked? I would I would I would do that. And then they would elect me king of the world. And then everything would be fantastic.

I just like, I mean, Amazon is like the funniest company when it comes to just products. Like the Kindle experience has clearly not been cared after for a long time and everything like kind of works, but it's super janky. Actually, I, this is obviously a very specific use case, which is why it's not very well supported, but I was trying to actually, I was reading David Burns, how music works. It's a tremendous book. And I was highlighting a lot and I was like, Oh, I'd actually like to save some of these quotes in a doc and,

So I like was trying to export the annotations or the highlights that I had made. And it was like erroring out. It was like, you do not have an email associated with your Amazon account. Just not true. And I was Googling around. And then it turns out the issue, and this is extremely specific, is that I didn't have an email address set up on the default mail app in iOS. Good Lord. Yeah.

Yeah, like, it didn't understand that I, like, use the Gmail app like a lot of people. So I, like, actually had to set up mail for the first time just so I could export these David Byrne quotes. And it's just like, at what point was that ever a solution? Like,

I'm sure they haven't updated in a long time, but they shipped it like that. You know? Yeah. So, anyway, you're asking about apps. Oh, and then I read a lot of PDFs in Dropbox. So, just truly like inelegant solutions to everything. Well, you're making me wonder if the not being precious about it is maybe part of the point. And I think I'm realizing now that this is kind of a trap that I've fallen into too, which is like I am...

I get really annoyed about how apps scroll, which is a really stupid thing to say, but like the iBooks or the Apple books scrolling animation annoys me. So I don't use the app. And then a lot of, a lot of things, like a lot of the read later apps just make you vertically scroll, which is fine for like a web article, but I hate for really long things. I want something that feels like pages. And so I ended up using the Kindle app just because it's like a

a slightly better app. And I'm realizing now that like the more precious you are about how all this works, the worse it actually is. Because if I got a PDF in Dropbox that was a book, there is a 0% chance I would read that book. Truly, like, and I'm not proud of that, but it's true. It would just irritate me that the, you know, margins were too big and I would not read the book. But I think getting past that might be a

key to doing this well. Yeah, I mean, every time I open the Kindle app, I'm just like appalled by the typeface choices. Like every time. I'm somehow like shocked every time and just the way it's like justified width, which just looks horrible on the phone. Oh yeah, it's awful. And we just, you know, we persist. Yeah.

That's true. Bravely. We are out here doing the hard work. You're also a big proponent of quitting books, which I think if we give people one tip on how to read more books, I actually think quit books quickly and without feeling bad about it might be the best tip. Yeah. I agree.

I mean, here's the thing. A lot of stuff, especially if you're reading fiction or books that are a little more challenging, there's also quite challenging nonfiction. If you read The Power Broker, you're going to have to get more than five pages in before you decide to quit, I think. But I think you should just set pretty clear thresholds for yourself. And I understand the idea of you bought a book, you should finish it. I don't know. I just don't know if I subscribe to that because one, like,

It's nice to buy books. They're not that expensive in the grand scheme of things, especially you can buy used books. And then like two, you know, you're supporting an industry that could use that support. And then three, also, there's always the library. So you have an unlimited stream of free things that you can be reading at any time. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing we should probably say here is that Libby, the app, is a wonderful thing that more people should take advantage of with the library card.

It is fabulous. Just like a lot of things. Once you get that sucker set up, it works like a dream, but it is a little bit fidgety to set up. It is. Actually, like a lot of reading stuff is fidgety to set up. For example, you know, I'm a books Palma convert because of you. So I do read on an e-ink device that is phone sized, which I like quite a lot. How do you like the Palma? You were apprehensive when you first were thinking about getting it. And we haven't really talked about it since you got it. What do you think?

Yeah, I know. I quite like it. I think just on principle, one, the thing is still too expensive. It's like nuts that it's, what, $200 or whatever. It's at least twice as expensive as it should be. And it really is like pretty crummy hardware and software, like through and through. It is just a clever form factor that works. And it just mostly works. And yeah, once I got kind of some of the settings figured out, like I had to go to Reddit for some good defaults. But yeah, I use this thing every day. Although...

I run into software bugs on it all the time. It's like weird to sideload things onto it. I don't know if you're having this issue. Like, I feel like the plastic on my book's palm is like yellowing. Oh, yeah. Just looks kind of disgusting. There's a real like patina thing happening that I'm not wild about. But patina is like the really generous way to describe what is happening to the plastic on that phone. Fair. But yeah, so it just felt like a weird thing.

amount of money to spend on something like that. But that said, you know, I use it every day. So that thing is amortized in value. Yeah. Big fan. Okay. And I mean, I've gotten, I really did not intend to become like America's number one proponent of the books, Palma, a device that I think has so, so, so many flaws. Uh,

But the question I get from people a lot is, A, whether they should buy that device and B, whether a dedicated reading device is worth it at all. Right. And I think like the Kindle is cheap enough that I think it kind of

people don't worry about it the same way. Like the base Kindle is like 60 bucks and you can often find it on sale. Like that's not a sort of investment in reading the way that like a Books Palma is an investment in reading. Like the thing's almost $300. It's very expensive. And the bet you're making is like, I'm going to have this with me a lot and it is going to be a device that I use on purpose. And I wonder, especially coming from the way you're thinking about it, which is that like,

The way to read more is to not be precious about it and to have it around all the time and to have lots of books going at a time that you can just kind of flit in and out of as you have moments. If the idea of having a dedicated reading device is actually maybe pulling you away from some of the things that might make you read more. That's a great question. I also just want to say that like your average Kindle device that's like several years old is probably a better piece of hardware than the books. Oh, unquestionably. Yeah.

But obviously, if you want to be slightly more of a power user and sideload things, like I was saying, I'm like reading PDFs of books that are out of print, things like that. Then yeah, like the Books Palma is pretty great for that. I don't know. I say this like I've been such a snob this whole time about like, oh, it's so easy to read. I have all these systems. But no, it's like still easy for me to get distracted on my phone.

So I do like having the Palma for that reason. Like just nothing, you know, even on do not disturb mode, you're just like, well, let me just check my email. And then the Palma is so funny because it just like,

the suckiness of the OS and the slowness of it and the jankiness of everything else. It's just like, you are not going to want to do anything else on that phone except read Buster, you know? Truly. Yeah. So I like the idea. The badness is the point. Yeah. And you know, I'm not, I know we call them like dumb phones or whatever. I don't know. I don't know if I like prescribe to all of that necessarily, but I can just say like, personally, I have

read quite a lot on the books palma and i enjoy that experience and i use this device far more than i thought i would i got in a lark because like my tax return came in and i was just like yeah i guess i trust david enough to spend 200 or whatever um and uh yeah pains me to say you were right i mean i really i appreciate that my legacy is this crappy gadget that is nevertheless like the thing we need in our lives i feel good about that

I love that you're like your legacy is like pushing like a 7 out of 10 device on the world. Seriously. Great. I'm happy to have helped. Last thing and then I'll let you go. I'm curious. You're also an author. You've written one book that's very good. And you just wrote another that I think is like just about to come out, right? Yeah, it's out in April. Okay, what's it called? Tell the people.

Yeah, it's called My Documents. It's a novel. You know, it's funny. I'm like three months out and I'm still having a hard time describing it accurately. But the plot is, it imagines a bunch of, well, it imagines a world where, a not too distant world where the U.S. decides to lock up, incarcerate all Vietnamese Americans, kind of as an echo of Japanese incarceration, which happened in World War II. The weird thing when I talk about this is, um,

It makes the book sound like really bleak. A lot of the book is like Zoomers trying to like live their life without the internet while they're in town. So it's like also kind of funny. I like it. It's like, I think very quietly or maybe not so quietly a tech novel. Okay. I like it. You...

Like you spend your day job thinking about like how people read digital things on the Internet and then you write books. And I'm curious, like especially as somebody who has like thought this deeply about how we read and how we consume this stuff and how technology is part of all of this.

Like, do you think about what how people are going to read your book when you're writing a book? Like, is are you like, this is a book that you should buy and print and read with covers and fancy whiskey? Or are you like sitting there being like, okay, I have to make the chapter shorter, because somebody is going to be reading this on the subway on the way to work.

It's a little bit less like imagining where people are or what device they'll be on when they're reading. But we both have like backgrounds in print magazines. And I think there's a way of thinking about the reader or the audience when you work in print for some reason, especially if you work on features. You know, these stories are like five to 10,000 words at times. And there's just sort of this sense like you just kind of want to keep

things pretty dynamic. Like you just don't want like long chunks of exposition, right? Like you want to move from like scenes to dialogue to exposition and back. And, uh, you know, you get to think about like layout in a magazine. You don't really get to do that in a book, but I think that was like in my brain as I was writing, like, I just wanted, I just like wanted things to feel active. There's like lots of different textures, um,

And actually, I kept all the chapters pretty short as well. So there's like a little Dan Brown in me, I guess. Are you non-precious as an author? Like when somebody sends you a photo of themselves, like reading your book,

on a on a crowded subway are you like that's not the right way to read new waves no uh no i would be delighted uh i'm well i am delighted anytime that happens um i still have yet to see anyone reading my book like out in the wild uh that's like kind of a dream scenario for me i've definitely had friends like send me photos of people like creep shotting on the subway um

And I don't know about the ethics of creep shouting, but please keep sending me those. I appreciate it. I like it. Okay, last thing, and then truly I'm done with you. Do you honestly read books during commercial breaks? You wrote this GQ article a bunch of years ago, and that was one of the things you said. And the article is very good, and I'll link to it in the show notes. And I think the advice really holds up even all these years later. And it's some of the stuff we've talked about. But you just say very casually that you read books during commercial breaks, which is unhinged to me. And I'm very curious about this. Do you really do that? Yeah.

I really do do this. Um, it's funny. I was watching a little bit of the Australian open before we jumped on this call. And, uh, yeah, like I forgot, like it's actually impossible. It's like hard to do it during tennis. Cause, um, commercial rates are so much shorter, but like during an NFL game, there are so many goddamn ads and they're all for draft Kings or burger King. And so it just like, I don't know, honestly, like you might not have to read, uh, during commercial rates, like just press mute for like your own fucking sanity. Uh, yeah.

Yeah, they're reading like a book, you know, three or four minutes at a time. And that's like how long these ad breaks are. It's nuts. Yeah. And again, I, you know, I'm usually reading on the phone and something kind of breezy and likely nonfiction. So I really do do that. Maybe that's a little bit too far and vice versa for people. I kind of love it. I was actually thinking about it last night because I was realizing that my

when there's like, you know, I have three minutes of downtime when it's whenever it's like, you know, Anna pauses the movie to go into the kitchen and get something or like it's commercials or whatever. I either open TikTok or Reddit like 100% of the time. I realized it's one of those two apps because it's like you can do it for any amount of time. It doesn't you can just sort of open and close it and however long you're there is fine. And I am I my goal is to replace that instinct with opening the Kindle app. And I

And I think that is like that was my main takeaway from thinking about this is like just the I have three minutes right now instead of opening one of those two apps. I'm going to try to read one page of a book and just see how far that gets me. And I think the alarming thing is I think that's going to get me a lot further than I am reckoning with because I think I spend a lot of time in TikTok that I don't necessarily clock as time I'm spending in TikTok.

Yeah. So, you know, someone told me recently that they deleted TikTok from their phone and they only have it on their iPad, which seems kind of nuts. But I kind of like, it's like, oh, you actually have to be a little more deliberate when you open TikTok. I don't even know if they have a dedicated iPad app. I almost hope it's like kind of the miniature one that gets like blown up. Just like, oh, actually just like Instagram, right? Right.

But yeah, we should check it in a few months and see if this strat works for you. Yeah, well, I'll keep you posted for sure. I feel like the first thing I have to do is find the right phone book to start. And then I'm going to see how long it takes me to get through it. But I'll keep you posted. We'll keep talking. Cool. All right, Kevin, thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a pleasure. Good luck to everybody who wants to read more. And if you have reading tips, send them to us. I would like to hear everybody's reading tips because we're all going to read more this year. It's going to be awesome. Thanks, Kevin. See you, David.

All right. We got to take one more break and then we will be back with a question from the Vergecast hotline. We'll be right back. You might have come into this year with all these big plans, but you're still scrambling to hire that open position at your company. It's time to get a big part of your to-do list marked off with the help of Indeed. Indeed.

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All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. We love all of your questions and we try to answer at least one on the show every week. I should say...

The hotline app that we use got kind of broken for a few days there. So it's possible that we missed some of your calls last week. I'm hopeful that we didn't and we'll be able to get to them. But if you called last week and asked a question, there's a chance we didn't get it. So, A, I'm sorry. And B, call again. I still want to hear all of your questions. And hopefully this stupid app doesn't break again. This week, we have a question about audio.

Hi, my name's Dan. I got a weird one. I guess it's not that weird. Why can't I listen to a podcast and music at the same time on my phone? I get like, you know, like 15 years ago when the iPhone was first coming out, you could only have one stream going on at once because there's a tiny little operating system or whatever. But like at this point, you know, I like to, you know, listen to quiet little lo-fi beats, a little, well,

all rain noises while I'm doing stuff. And I also kind of want to listen to podcasts and I could do that on my PC really easy. But like, can you even do that on iOS? Surely at this point, you can do that on iOS somehow, right? Anyway, big, big fan. Have a great day. Bye.

Okay, this sent me down a very fun rabbit hole because actually this is a thing I have wondered a lot about too. Not because I want to do the two audio sources thing at the same time, but because Apple handles this terribly. Like there are the sources you want to have audio from, right? There's whatever you use to listen to music, whatever you use to listen to podcasts. For me, that's Spotify and Pocket Cast respectively. Then there's all the streaming services which have audio and video.

But then you open a specific website or a certain app that is not an audio first app and it just kind of kills the audio that you're listening to. Like for me, the one that always does it is the ESPN app. For whatever reason, the ESPN app, as soon as you open it, before it even plays anything, just kind of takes over the media player and says, actually, I am now the source of audio.

It's just terrible software. Like this is poorly put together and poorly written. And I think the thing that I have learned in doing research about this and talking to folks about this is it is purely Apple's decision to do it this way. There is nothing technically that prevents lots of audio sources all coming together on your phone. I don't know.

I kind of get the idea. I think in general, most of the time you only want to be listening to one thing at a time. And like, you know, that thing where you have a background tab in your browser that just starts playing audio out of nowhere and you can't figure out where it is and it's super annoying.

That kind of thing would be even worse on your phone because A, it might just start playing in the background while your phone is locked, like it's in your pocket making noise and that sucks. You'd have a much harder time finding where things are and where they're playing audio because there aren't such good controls for that stuff in the system. So there's not just like a where is playing audio screen that you can go and open and do that. So I get the principle here, but I think...

Apple either needs to force its developers to do this better or make it easier for users to mess with. Because the other thing that'll happen is like, if you're listening to a podcast and then you open up TikTok, TikTok will start playing and it will, you know, drop the podcast audio out. But then if you pause TikTok, the podcast audio just comes back in a way that is very kind of chaotic and I think is like bad UI. Right.

So these things are just poorly handled. And to some extent, I'm almost like, just give me a thing that is like, here is all the audio playing. You're in charge. Do whatever you want with the video of it. You can actually do something like that on Android. If you use a Samsung phone, there's an app called Sound Assistant that actually gives you some of that control over multiple sources of audio, where it's coming from, where it's going, and you can route everything a little bit better.

It's hacky. And again, it's the kind of thing that you don't need most of the time. Most of the time, you just want to be listening to one thing. I think that is a reasonable assumption for all of these companies to make. But they should give you more controls. And also...

I know how Apple should fix this. It's so simple to me. There should be an app on every Apple device that is called Now Playing. If you've ever used CarPlay, you've seen the thing called Now Playing. It's the triangle play icon. It's with lines. Whatever is playing, it shows up in Now Playing. And you tap on that thing and it shows you the audio that's playing and you can play it or pause it, whatever.

That should be an app that exists on your phone and it should be all of the audio sources available to you at any given time. Right. So like I think about it sort of like clipboard history where it just saves all the stuff you've copied and then you can go back through and be like, oh, paste that one now and paste that one now. But instead it would be audio history. It's like, oh, OK, you were watching and listening to 30 Rock. Would you like to have the audio of that playing in your phone?

in the background while you're doing something else, or, you know, play your podcast while you're looking at some media player, but I actually just want to see the video on mute and keep listening to my podcast. This is a thing people should be able to choose. And I think we live in a world now where actually so much video and audio content

is now foregrounded in all of these apps that I think this idea that actually you only want to listen to one thing and that thing is probably also the thing that you're looking at is just not correct. So what I've come to after doing a lot of research on this is that Apple picked a reasonable way to do this to say you're only going to get one audio source at a time and it is going to be sort of the last audio source that you encountered. Reasonable assumption,

17 years ago. I think it's the wrong assumption now. And I think one interesting thing that needs to happen on a lot of these devices is they're going to have to get much smarter about inputs and outputs. I mean, especially you think about something like smart glasses. If they can't dynamically and intelligently figure out what you want to be listening to at any given time,

they're gonna fall apart. That's the kind of thing that you can't do easily yourself. And if it's choosing for you and it's picking the wrong thing at the wrong time, that's gonna be a bad experience. So I think the way that these systems handle audio is actually going to get more important and more complicated over time. And the answer, I am increasingly convinced, is just to give us a little tiny bit of chaos. If I wanna listen to music and a podcast and a show at the same time,

I believe that I should be able to. I don't think that I should. I think that's kind of bonkers, but I think I should be able to. And that is my official stance. Give me a now playing app that just shows me all of the audio from everywhere on my phone and let me figure it out. Except for browser tabs, because if we get to the point where things get to do the like lazy loading audio that starts playing five minutes after you load a browser tab, that's a nightmare. So none of that in the browser.

Let my let my apps do some weird stuff. Well, I'll figure it out. Anyway, that is it for the first cast today. By the way, if you have tips on how to make the audio stuff make more sense, both on Android and on an iPhone, I am all ears. I know there's a way you can jailbreak an iPhone and get more control over the audio sources. That's actually one way I know the phones are capable of doing it in theory.

But I don't think most people want to jailbreak their phone. But if you figured out some clever hack for how to manage all the audio on your phone, let me know. I'm all ears. 866-VERGE11, vergecastattheverge.com. Thank you to everybody who came on the show. And thank you, as always, for listening. Like I said, we're going to talk a bunch more about the world in TikTok bans and politics and inaugurations on Friday's show. And then, honestly, it is my sincere hope that...

that we are not going to have to keep doing that. I think we are in a very political moment full of a lot of change and a lot of new ways that the tech industry is going to exist, particularly in the United States. And we're going to talk about it in the ways that it makes sense. But I think we're going to try not to make this a podcast about politics because we don't want that. And I know you don't either.

Anyway, there's lots more on everything we covered here at theverge.com. I'll link to Kevin's GQ story that I really liked. I'll link to a bunch of Jacob's reporting. I'll link to our reporting on Venue. All of it in the show notes on the website. Keep it locked.

News is nuts. And as always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or again, audio tips for me, you can always email us at vergecastsattheverge.com. Call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. We truly love hearing from you. This show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Neil and I will be back on Friday to talk about, like I said, the inauguration, the TikTok ban, more AI news. There's a Samsung event this week. Then we're going to get to talk about gadgets, which I'm very excited about. Lots to do. We will see you then. Rock and roll. Support for the show comes from Delta Airlines.

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