HBO's no good very bad rebrand
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Hello and welcome to our cast, the flagship podcast of pretending that everyone has Aston Martins.

You know, just all everybody who does it. One of the great flexes of all time is being able to say our product has begun rolling out in one car. No one will ever buy. Well, no, it's all new or Aston Martins, David. Yeah. One car. No one will ever buy. Sorry, I have to buy a new Aston Martin for this. I can't get this on my existing. We're going to get to it. But yes, it is new Aston Martins as of today. And then if you...

you have a newer Aston Martin that has the next generation Aston Martin infotainment system, you can go to your dealer and get a software update because God knows Aston Martin owners cannot insert a USB drive into their own car. Okay, I have a question. There is one Aston Martin in my neighborhood. Is it

journalistically problematic if next time I see them, I track them to their house and ask them questions in their driveway about their Aston Martin. There's only one. I know I could recite the license plate, but I will not. But it's like it's an Aston Martin. I see it a lot and it's like, oh, that's the Aston Martin. And I have always wondered where they live. Do I now have a good journalistic reason to find out? Go slow. Start with cookies. You know, OK. Just like ask about the neighborhood.

And then a couple of weeks later, be like, I need to go for a drive. I like this. As a car person, this breaks in two ways. One, this guy has been dreaming of the day someone shows up and is like, I see you have an Aston Martin. Yeah, there's no reason to buy one otherwise, right? Yeah. Like I drive the Mustang around and like the high school kids are like, we have the engine. I'm like, well, this is why I bought this car. Like, it's great. That's exactly what you want. And then there's the car people who are like,

I'm not here. I was in Florida a couple of years ago, right when the lucid air came out. And this was like, we're on vacation in like my friend's ritzy part of Florida. And I saw his neighbor had a lucid air. And so we were walking up and I deployed Max, who was, you know, at the time a toddler, so like extra cute. And I toddled her over to the lucid air. And I was like, my kid likes your car. What is it? And he's like, I don't know what you're talking about. And you just don't, you just walk away. You just, you don't want to.

Right. That's a person with security. He did not. I was like, no, not a lot of people have these. How'd you get it? He's like, I don't know. What are you talking about? I don't have a car. What's a car? Who are you? Now it's like Lucid would like everyone to talk about the Lucid era a little bit more than they have been. But there's only two ways this goes. Right. Okay.

I mean, it's an Aston. I think I know which way. No one's secretive about their Aston Martin. No. If you're secretive about an Aston, you have too much money. I don't like it. But there's not like, yeah, it's not like a hard, you don't have to get like an allocation to get a new Aston Martin. True. There's like Ferraris that you can only buy if you've bought enough previous Ferraris. This is why all the crypto bros have Lambos, by the way. This is a real thing.

Lambos are like new money is associated with Lamborghini because Lamborghini will just sell you a car. You're like, oh my God, I did it. Meme coin. What do I do? Buy a Lambo. And the reason is because you just show up at the Lamborghini and they will just be like, yeah, you give us money and here's this car. You show up at the Ferrari dealership and like, have you bought our shit Ferraris for the past 10 years and kept them and not recently? Now you may have our best Ferrari. And those guys do not talk about where they're at. They're also often, uh, uh,

you know, the rulers of Middle Eastern nations. So they often talk about it. Anyhow, we're going to talk about next generation. I don't know how we got here. We're going to talk about next generation card play. David is going to get arrested stalking his neighbor in Washington, DC. That's going to make for amazing podcasts later in this episode. We have to start though with news about ourselves. This is a real thing. We're going to start with news about ourselves. It's how we think. David, would you like to tell the class what's going on in your life? I, I,

I'm having a baby in soon. To be clear, you are not. I am not personally having a baby. My wife is having a baby and I will be there at the time where she's due July 6th. So sometime between mid-June and mid-July, I am just going to disappear into the ether for a couple of months. And you also have news.

My news is congratulations, David. Uh-huh. Thank you. It's great. And now to add some complexity to this mix, my wife is also having a baby one week after David and his wife. So our due date is July 14th. Children will arrive and then we will disappear. Yep. We're going to go away. We're going to try to take leave. Box Media is actually really, really great parental leave. It didn't when I had my first baby. Okay.

And I only took like eight weeks. And now we have a really great industry leading lead. We're going to try to take it, like model it for our team, like the whole thing that we do. I suspect I will fail in some ways to take the whole thing, just given the nature of the job. But I'm going to try. I'm going to try. And in the meantime, on this show, Jake is going to take over hosting. It's going to be fun. Yeah.

Yeah. First off, congratulations to both of you. It was very exciting. They said this off camera, but they're both going to do live stream gender reveal parties. I think it's probably going to be on Twitch. Stay tuned. That's fun. I like that idea. Yeah. It's definitely what we want to do. I'm going to do mine in the woods and we're going to fire a cannon of some kind. Do you think that's a

Bad idea. Our doctor in their office in the waiting room, there's a sign. You know when there's a sign, you know this has been a problem like in a corporate environment. The sign says, we will not tell anyone the gender of your baby. And it says like literally down the line. Oh my God. It's like, we will not call the bakery. We will not call your grandparents. Oh wow. And it's like a long list. And it's like every one of those is something that has happened.

And we will not call the bakery is the first one. There have been like siblings and cousins who are calling being like, tell me so I can go do the gender reveal party. We were just like, tell us we want to know. But I what appears to be happening is people go in for the whatever one reveals the sex of the baby. And then they don't want to know. And they ask the doctor, will you call our bakery so we can get the cake that reveals the gender? And they're like, we are not part of this.

If you would like a cake to be involved in this situation, the baker can come with you. See, I thought there was a HIPAA carve out for bakers. It's very good.

But like every one of those on the side, it's like, oh, this has happened, like down to like fireworks story. And it's like, we're just like not doing that. You realize you just described like an Uber Eats feature waiting to happen, right? Like it's someone will come with you, find out the sex of your baby and then go acquire all the necessary things for your gender reveal party. It's very good. It's sitting there. It is. It is truly good. But, um,

Yeah, we're going in July. We're just going to dip. Yeah. And you're going to be fine. Yeah, it's going to be a delightfully chaotic Vergecast summer.

Jake is going to take over the Friday shows. We have some really fun plans for the Tuesday shows. You're going to hear a bunch of different voices from the virtual people. And the instruction that Mila and I have been giving to everybody is just get real weird with it. So we take no responsibility for what happens over the summer, but also I think it's going to be very fun. And I'm excited to actually get to listen to the show and not hear my own stupid voice. Yeah, it's going to be a good time. I'll

I'll still be here. We're going to be bringing people in from all across The Verge. So lots of faces that you already know and are familiar with. Hopefully, we'll get some more time for folks who get on here a little less often. We're going to have a good time. Yeah. And then on Decoder, what we're going to do is Alex Heath is going to host the Thursday episode. So it'll be explainer episodes. Here's what's going on. And on Monday, the CEO interviews. We have a bunch of really cool guest hosts. I'm very excited to announce some of these names as they come up. That's going to be really fun. I've told those folks...

don't try to make decoder interviews. Just go talk to people you think are really interesting and like have a good time. And I think once you hear who the guests are, you will be equally excited about the idea of those people just like playing in the sandbox. So that's the plan. It's, it's, it's just gonna be a mess. Yeah. I think everyone will be happy that I'm not around. Just be perfectly honest. Everyone will finally breathe.

The tech industry will take a break. Brendan Carr is, honestly, I'm just going to call in once a week and rail at Brendan. If you thought that you would get one ounce of relief. I don't know how I turned an announcement into us having babies and what's right about Brendan Carr, but I did it. Brendan Carr as a dummy has always been just for Ne-Li. So it stands to reason that you will keep making it even when. I'm going to hold my new child to the light like Simba and be like, your job is to torment this man.

It's going to be great. I'm really excited about it. We have done a basically bad job of keeping this secret for months. So I'm glad we can finally tell all of you. But it's happening. We're weeks away. And then Dave and I have to figure out how to be parents of infants again, which will be a delight. Yeah. I will say baby monitor technology has progressed exactly zero in the past seven years. Quick question. Who is reviewing the SNU? It's going to be...

So I threatened to review the SNU when Max was born. And Dr. Harvey Karp, the inventor of the SNU, and I had many, many, many conversations. There's a lot going on with that product. He is very charming. I think Kristen Radke, our creative director, has written about the SNU in the meantime. We've had a lot of babies on the Verge team recently. There's a lot of SNU opinions. Sure. Max hated the SNU.

I was going to review it and we stuck her in it. There's a hilarious picture on my Instagram where she's just in it. Like she's a little baby and she's all swaddled up because you put them in a straight jacket to put them in the snow. And she's just like,

what the fuck is this? Like, it's just like every exposed part of her body is communicating that message from her eyes down. So we never used it. She was just like, I hate you. I'm very upset with you. I don't know, David, were you a snoo person? No, we, I spent an alarming amount of money on things a baby might sleep in that ours decided not to sleep in, but we never got all the way to the snoo. In part because right before I left on leave, you and I were in a car

in San Francisco going somewhere and you spent like an hour in traffic railing against the SNU and I was just like well I guess I won't get the SNU so the SNU is just not allowed after that look we have some parents Jay Peters on our team like loves the SNU like I think they his view of it is like they wouldn't have gotten through it without the SNU great like whatever like

The lesson you learn when you have the first baby is no one knows anything at all. Correct. The babies are very resilient and they will be fine and you just have to get through it. And so like whatever works, man, like I have no judgment. But Max just hated this thing. And there's one piece of information from my many conversations with Dr. Karp that just it just it just undid it for me.

Uh, so the, the snoo, you know, like rocks the baby. It like, it detects when the baby wakes up and it starts rocking. And then he, you know, there's this, it makes noise. It makes like white noise. And he, in his books, if you read happiest baby, which is his book or whatever, he's like, we tried to make the sounds of, uh, like mothers around the world. They all instinctively make this sound, uh,

And in the book, and even when you talk to him, he always comes back to like the sound Indian mothers make, which is, and he's like, and they go, shoop, shoop. And he's like, and then he's got this idea that all these cultures make this sound. So what you got to do is like pet the baby really hard and go, and I'm like, dude,

If you go up to it, like my mom and you're like, did you ever just say to me really loud? She's like, no, because that means shut up. Like, that's what my mom would say when she was angry at me later in life to shut up. I was like, this is just a weird there's a gap here. I don't understand. And then later I was actually talking to him. I was like, where are these sounds like you have this big idea about these sounds and this like cultural connection to the sound. Like, how did you make the sound that this thing makes?

And I would just never forget it. He was like, oh, yeah, my nephew and I sat around making GarageBand. And I was like, all right, dude. It always comes back to GarageBand. I'm like, all right, man. So I will say Dr. Karp is lovely. I believe he's very sincere. He has all these ideas of what this new is and what it should be and different ways for it to go to different people. They got in trouble recently for pricing. I think Jay actually wrote that story for us. Many, many parents love this product. It was just, I...

My daughter and I were both like, I don't know. Anyway, we're going to have more babies. We'll have further SNU coverage.

That's it, everybody. That's the first cast. There's some destabilizing news. Yeah. And to be clear, we're not going anywhere for a while here. So we got time. We have many things left to talk about before we do. We have lots of developer conferences coming up. There's lots of news. And then we're going to take a break for the summer and come back. All right. Let's talk about speaking of things named Max.

This is the this should be the greatest day in recent history in your household. Just the long national nightmare of Max streaming services. They didn't get rid of the word Max. Now it's a qualifier.

That's true. It's an adjective now and not the noun. So the news is that Warner Brothers Discovery had its upfronts this week. All the streamers had their upfronts. That's where they present to advertisers all the new kinds of things they can buy, the new content that will be out on the services. And as part of the WBD upfronts, they announced that the streaming service Max would now be called HBO Max.

which is what it was called to begin with. And they changed it 50 times along the way, landing on Max, big campaign. They shoved it full of weird discovery reality shows, and we can talk about all that history. And then they realized that no one cared about that. What they wanted was HBO shows. So they're taking the weird discovery reality shows out and renaming the whole thing HBO Max, which, again, is what it was called.

And what everybody continued to call it. Like they just could not break that. It's funny how much the AT&T Time Warner deal is going to come up in this episode. It's going to come up a lot. AT&T bought Time Warner. The only thing that that resulted in was the grayscale 4-3 Snyder Cut.

That's what happened. They bought AT&T, bought Time Warner, and then Zack Snyder was like, these dorks have money and berated them with an online harassment campaign into completing the Snyder Cut, the pinnacle of which was a grayscale 4.3 Snyder Cut, which you can go watch right now. It's called Justice is Gray. It continues to exist on the service now. But in terms of concrete results of AT&T buying Time Warner, that is it.

As near as I can tell. Oh, thousands of jobs were lost. Just a little side note. Minor detail, yeah. Many, many, many thousands of layoffs, but you got a 4-3 grayscale snyder cut. It's in 4-3 because he wanted it to be an IMAX, but no one has an IMAX screen in their house. So he was like, tall, so we're going to go with 4-3. That literally is his explanation for why it's in 4-3. Whatever. That's the only result of AT&T buying Temweir that you can still see to this day or that resulted really in anything at all.

This turned out to be a bad idea because it turns out you can't build your entire business on one movie. It's really the only thing that happened. So AT&T sells Time Warner to Warner Brothers Discovery, to Discovery, David Zaslav. He's like, well, you got this asset called HBO Max. That's the thing. That's the streaming service that's already out. I'm going to turn it into a competitor, Netflix, by dumping all my stuff on it. And then he re-names it Max. Yeah, he's smushed Discovery plus...

And HBO Max together and called it Max, essentially. And also on this literally same day, he killed the CNN Plus streaming service that AT&T Time Warner had launched just before selling their entire company to Discovery. As of today, both of those big decisions have been completely rolled back. Yep. CNN Plus coming back. Yeah. CNN Plus has come back as a standalone streaming service. HBO Max is...

is now HBO Max again, and Discovery content has been put out of it. Literally, oh, by the way, thousands of people have been laid off along the way. Like, none of this has worked, and mostly people have lost their jobs.

And now they're, you know, they're doing this acute marketing campaign where they're like, we know we screwed. It's like, no, you really screwed up. This is such an unbelievable disaster that I like, you cannot put too fine a point on how stupid this company has been throughout every single bit of this process. And they are, they're trying to play it off like a joke. They did in the,

press release announcing this they included the the Ross and Rachel we were on a break thing which like a cool timely cultural reference guys uh everybody knows what friends is now uh

And then they did a thing where there was like the white smoke coming out and they were like, we've picked a new brand. And it's like, no, no, no. What happened is you're idiots. And you were over and over. And the very, very thing that everybody said the first day you announced this, which is that this is monumentally stupid because you are taking the best brand in entertainment and just deleting it from existence in the name of every nonsensical thing that you want to put on this platform. Yeah.

They're just unwinding it completely. And then now, again, there are lots of rumors and some really good reporting out there that suggests that this company is about to split up again. Like, truly, we are just going to have accomplished nothing except burning a ton of money and losing many, many jobs. Fat thing.

Over and over and over again. They're really good at that thing. They're really good at that thing. They are really good at cost cutting. We rail against mergers on the show constantly. The thing with mergers, in particular, mergers with Time Warner, is that all they do is delete jobs and make everyone look stupid. Yeah. Like, if you're out there being like, I could do a better job with this. I should buy Time Warner. I urge you to walk into the ocean and never look back. Because that will be a more successful outcome for you than buying Time Warner. It is the kiss of death. AOL, Time Warner was a company.

I used to work at it and gather was part of AOL time Warner and it destroyed that company. It, it broke it in half. Kara Swisher wrote two books about it. One of them has a great, greatest hell of any business book ever. There must be a pony in here somewhere. It's a quote from a, I believe a time Warner exec who said, this is a giant pile of shit. And our entire thesis is there has to be a pony in here somewhere. God, that's incredible. That is a really good line. Yeah.

That's really good. Incredible. You should go read it. It's just a bunch of egos who think they can just like manufacture a thing out of nothing. And that has been the story of Time Warner this whole time. I guess this time it's just Warner. Time Inc., the other part of Time Warner, was sold to Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, who immediately invested in Humane and then had Time Magazine name the Humane bin one of the best inventions of the year. Doing great, everybody. So that's going great over there. Yeah.

But you just see that the problem is you keep buying the media asset and then treating it like a commodity and thinking that's going to work. And thinking in particular that you can make something that isn't fancy, fancy just because you have the Warner Brothers library. And so with AOL, it was we're going to make AOL fancy by having this big media company and people will buy AOL because of it.

Essentially the same thesis for AT&T. AT&T's thesis was we will preload bite-sized versions of Game of Thrones on mid-range Android phones, and that's why people will choose us instead of Verizon. I don't have to say anything else about that. And then Discovery's thesis was David Zaslav is a mid-market reality schlockster, and he's going to become a titan of Hollywood by having Warner Brothers.

And doing all this stuff. And he immediately was like, what if instead of caring about the new fancy thing I bought, I loaded it up with my mid-market schlock. And you remember that slide from the beginning where they were like, here's the stuff we make for women and here's the stuff we make for men. And we're like, bring these icons together. And it was just such an obtuse way of thinking about anything online.

Like content, people, humanity. Like it's like this is an NBA fever dream that will result in nothing but layoffs. And here we are. Well, even in the most generous reading of what happened, that came true and Netflix just absolutely kicked its ass at it up and down. Like even if you want to say there is room for one sort of all encompassing general purpose at all things to all people, every level of content streamer,

That's Netflix. It was obvious then that it was going to be Netflix and it has become even more entrenched as Netflix since then. Like the idea was truly to come out and out Netflix, Netflix. And boy, have a lot of companies died attempting to out Netflix, Netflix. Which is fascinating because Netflix still has not figured out how the like good movie part of making movies and Warner Brothers like.

As much as that's not going particularly well, they at least still make movies people want to watch. And Netflix has really figured out how to do the like mid-tier, totally average reality show that they can just fill the library with. Well, right. Ironically, Netflix's whole...

thing. Like, do you remember years ago we were talking about like, can Netflix become HBO before HBO becomes Netflix? And the answer was like, actually, neither one happened. But Netflix didn't need to become HBO. Yeah. What it realized is that we're just going to release so many mediocre Chris Hemsworth movies that we're going to make up for it in volume. And we're going to have a lot of C minus action movies and

and just infinity reality shows. And that solves most of our problem. And that actually making good movies is really hard, but making a lot of like movies is pretty easy and all it costs is money. And so like Netflix has just decimated the competition in that particular game. And so now reading through all the stuff that David Zaslav in particular is saying,

It is the most disingenuous way of being like, I was wrong and we got our ass kicked. And so we're going to go back to our old strategy, which is what if we just made good things? And if the job is just to make good things, you know what's the best brand ever for making good things? HBO. This is what everybody said when they did it first. Why would you light on fire the thing that most signifies quality entertainment?

And now they're like, what if we did quality entertainment? I can't think of a single rebrand that's really like gone over well. So there's always the knee-jerk reaction. But truly, I cannot think of another rebrand where from the moment it happened, for years afterward...

like up through, you know, leaders in the industry saying it was a bad idea forever. And that is what has happened with the Max Free brand, right? Like we get to Ted Sarandos like a month ago being like, what were they thinking? Which like at that point, it's like, I don't know. Do you stick with it out of pure shame or do you just take the hint from the guy who's really successful? Well, there's David, you made the point many times that Netflix knows it's only real competition is YouTube.

And once you have that realization that you're competing for minutes in the day and the only real competition for those minutes are video games and YouTube, you do two things. One, you start making video games, which Netflix has started to do. And two, you realize, oh, we're not here for fancy, right? The minutes in the day are being consumed by us on YouTube. There's no CGI here, ladies and gentlemen. There should be because I think I should be de-aged, but we'll get to that.

But YouTube content is fundamentally cheap. It's vastly cheaper than the stuff that HBO makes. And so Netflix has just realized they can occupy a place on the middle of that cost curve and have a huge amount of volume that's slightly better than YouTube. And that's going to be great. And I think what Zaslav wanted to do was play that exact same game again.

With stuff that doesn't feel like YouTube at all, that feels like weird cable reality programming that is like just kind of fine. Like it's not even a thing. It's not even a thing that YouTube offers you, which is at least it's mostly real people talking to you. Right. It's like this other thing that still has these like weird high production costs. And so Netflix is starting to get into it. They're going to relaunch Star Search. Right.

They've got John Mulaney doing a live talk show. But that stuff feels different. It like it qualitatively feels different than old school cable reality programming. It qualitatively feels different than YouTube. It occupies a different space and they're winning on the time. And then you're like, sure, here's whatever garbage Netflix movie of the month. It's just like the next thing you can watch. I think HBO's game is like White Lotus, right? Like appointment prestige programming that costs a bunch of money. Yeah.

I don't know if that will be successful. I don't know if he's trying to sell it again. It does feel like he's trying to sell it again. But man, like to just have missed it strategically so hard.

Because you could have built that stuff with HBO. Right. And now they're saying this is the strategy, right? Like they're just coming out and being like, oh, what we understand now is that customers don't want just more stuff to watch. They want the high quality stuff. And it's like, yeah, that's the HBO pitch. That's how HBO became this like titanically successful company.

Thing on cable like that. It works if you just have an ongoing run of the buzziest show on television, which I think HBO has done more successfully probably than every other network combined over the last several decades. You can win.

And it works. It's hard. It's very hard. And you cannot manufacture it out of nothing. But the fact that HBO has like built the culture that keeps this stuff coming is very impressive. And so to look at that and be like, oh, we're just going to sort of cast that off to the side. Then to only several years later, turn around and realize, oh, people like good shows.

It's just so backwards and insane to me. Like, to just completely ignore every actual asset you have and then turn around and be like, oh, we have these assets. Those are cool. It's like, what are you doing? It just drives me insane. The story of HBO is super fascinating and where it came from and this challenge of constantly trying to re-up the creative because the shows end.

Right? It's just like, it's over now. Like, the White Lotus has to exist because the previous HBO, because Succession is over. Right. Right. Like, that has really always been the engine of HBO. We did a Decoder episode with Felix Gillette and John Koblin who wrote a book called It's Not TV, The Spectacular Rise, Revolution and Future of HBO. It's a great book. Which just details it. We'll link that episode. You should go read that book. But they've got to get back to that. Right? It's not clear what engine makes the next White Lotus in HBO anymore. Right.

That's the problem. And if they are trying to sell it, it's also not clear who would buy it because that's just an expensive, risky proposition compared to here's a bunch of cheap stuff. We hope you watch it, which is kind of what they're all doing right now. I think Netflix should buy it and just rebrand as HBO just as for one day as a bit just to really knife David Zaslav again. Zaslav should be fired. I'm just going to say it.

This has been such a disaster that whatever board – and I realize he's the one who bought it and his company and his deal. And if you read the TikToks of the deal back when he bought Warner Brothers, he was the savior, right? He like pitched AT&T on this deal. AT&T needed out because they woke up one day and realized they were AT&T. And this had been a huge boondoggle. And he like rescued it by engineering this deal and everything.

You know, he's obviously the source in all these stories. Like all these stories like describe the ballrooms and restaurants and that they made the deal in. And it's like, dude, you suck so bad. Like everyone saw it coming. You pissed off everyone by canceling shows right away, by taking tax breaks on things that were already done, whether or not they were good. Just a just a mess, a creative financial mess from the start.

Because this man does not know what he's doing. And if there's a board of directors there, you know, in the same way that like maybe Tesla's board of directors should take a hard look at how the company is going and they won't. It feels like the Warner Brothers Discovery Board should take a hard look at what has happened to that company under this management and be like, maybe somebody else should do this. Maybe when we saw Warner Brothers, we ought to rethink this whole situation. Because this style of management is effectively the only product they have consistently shipped is layoffs.

And Jake, to your point, it's not like this is a thing that is only obvious in retrospect. Everyone who was paying attention has been saying this the whole time, including their competitors, who don't normally say things out loud about this, but who were happy to be like, boy, it seems weird that if you have HBO, you just stop calling it HBO. I really can't think of any other company that has had such a like

obstinate position, right? Like, Nilay, to what you're saying, they've just been fighting with everybody, right? Everybody's telling them this name change is bad. Everybody's telling them, hey, maybe you should release that movie everybody wants to watch. And they're just like, no, we're just going to like pocket it, right? We didn't, we're going to save a little bit of cash by not finishing it. Dude, they lost Christopher Nolan. Right, right. Like that is

heads would be spinning at like any other functional studio. Like people would be, would have lost their job over that, right? People put so much work into curating a roster of directors that they can rely on and getting the best, you know, movies and shows and, you know, creators to their studio. Those things take like hours.

ages to build and they just lost it in, I mean, weeks, right? Like he just right out the door and it's just been a few years of that and it is puzzling what the strategy is supposed to be there. Yeah, the fact that I had to watch Oppenheimer on Peacock is maybe the worst thing that David Taz left in. Okay, now you've mentioned Peacock so I need to disclose sort of a roundabout way their usual block of entertainment disclosures. Um,

NBC Universal, whose parent is Comcast, is a minority investor in Vox Media. They hate us. Comcast does. And we'll get to why shortly. Because we cover them as an ISP, like the thing that we do. I executive produce a Netflix show, which you can watch, called The Future Of. It pays us no money when you watch it, so it's fine. Yeah.

That deal is long since over. And in general, we subscribe to all these streaming services. There used to be more. We have a TikTok account. It's at DecoderPod. It's like whatever you want. We're all tied up in all these things. But, you know, it's not like these companies have any love lost for our coverage. The Nolan thing is particularly interesting. You have a...

whose name alone allows you to be like, we're going to spend $400 trillion on a series of movies that are a deep introspection on the nature of love and memory. And then they will all be hits. Cool. It's like, you don't lose that guy. No one will understand any of them. What? And he's just like, we're just going to let that guy walk. And it's because they insisted on releasing day and date

with the streaming service because they thought the streaming service was the point. And if you are Warner Brothers, the point is making the movies. If you're HBO, the point is making the great shows, not the streaming service. Yes, you need to have the business to support that effort, but the thing that's valuable is the work. You know, we talk about Netflix. They're quickly coming to a place where the thing that's valuable is the service and the work is just sort of fine and it's medium and it propels it along and everyone is jealous of that.

But you can't get there unless you have their scale and you never will. Even Netflix is starting to run into troubles with that, right? Like there was all this reporting a while ago about the, after the huge Barbie hit, Greta Gerwig is doing Chronicles of Narnia movies and they had this big fight over, Greta Gerwig wanted it to be in theaters because people who make films want them to be in theaters. Netflix was like, no, we don't do theaters. And so they had this big fight and eventually Greta Gerwig won and it's going to get a theatrical run. So like,

Netflix is desperately trying to get away from the work mattering in a lot of ways, but I think is still able to play that game the right way. And

all David Zaslav seems to be able to do is just swing from zero to 100. Those are his only two moves. I don't really know what's in Netflix's interest at this point to not allow those theatrical runs, right? Especially if you're going to make movies that are allegedly supposed to be, you know, big budget hits. That's how you build buzz.

People like seeing things in theaters. Don't get me wrong. It's great. Like I during the pandemic when I could just be like, boom, zoom, like boop and watch Dune on like the first day. It's great. Love it.

But if you're going to, you know, upset an entire community of people who you need to rely on to make the stuff that makes your business, maybe you should just do that. Right. Especially if it's going to make you a lot more money. There's just a vanishing number of people with the leverage to do that. Yeah. Like, and I think it's in Netflix's interest to make sure there's never another Christopher Nolan. Right.

I mean, the F1 movie this summer is going to be a really interesting test case here because it is such a big swing. It's a big movie. It's going to be in theaters. It's Brad Pitt. A lot of people are paying attention that it's going to be super ugly for Apple if this doesn't work. And I've heard a bunch of people who are really concerned that it is not going to work. And...

unless this thing is a big giant hit, uh, it's gonna, I suspect make every streamer look even more sideways at the idea of like really giving these things a public run. Like they don't share numbers for a reason and you have to, when it goes to theaters. Yeah. I have a lot of feelings for that F1 movie. Uh,

I suspect it will not be a hit. Just having watched the trailers, I think they're trying to Days of Thunder F1. You know what I mean? Yeah. And like, Days of Thunder only worked because it was Top Gun again. Like, literally, it was just, they were like, well, that was a great movie. We haven't invented sequels yet. It's the 80s. We're going to do Top Gun 2. Top Gun, but on the ground. Yeah. And it was like way more expensive and way worse in like lots of ways. Whatever. But like, yeah.

Structurally, that movie worked because you're like, what Tom Cruise is going to do is drive faster than everyone else at the end of this movie. Yep. And F1 fans know that that is not a thing an F1 car can just do. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, they're all pretty much going as fast as they can all the time. Right. And the cars are different in a way that NASCAR cars are not. There's literally a plot point in...

in Days of Thunder where they're like, you have to learn how to drive the car. And he's like, sure. And you can't do that in F1. This movie is going to make no sense because they're going to try to Days of Thunder F1 and every F1 fan is going to be mad. Yes. We'll just see how it goes. It's going to go great. What could possibly go wrong? Also, the last Brad Pitt movie that George Clooney, Wolfs, on Apple TV didn't

It was fine. It was extremely fine. It was extremely, it was the most plain movie I've watched in a long time. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was like so deeply fine in a way that like you get the sense they were trying to make Mr. and Mrs. Smith again, but like George Clooney was Angelina Jolie.

And you're like, well, there's still there's still an odd amount of sexual tension here. Like, oh, yeah, much more than I expected. Oh, yeah. But not I ship the two of them for sure. Yeah. Anyhow, we'll see how that goes. There's more streaming news in this zone because none of these people can stop asking you for money. Speaking of plans that have gone away and come back and once again risen, ESPN is launching its own app for $30 a month.

Because I think they've realized that Caleb Wendell can't save Disney. It's over. Fox is going to launch its sports app. It's called Fox One. It's going to launch for the NFL season. That's when you would do it. It's not technically just sports. It's also for, you know, right wing propaganda and various other things. But it's mostly for sports. All of these are mostly for sports. Yeah, because that's what they have the rights to. Right. And they've all spent billions of dollars buying these rights. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know. Like there's just moves that are, YouTube has Sunday ticket. They're going to stream an NFL game for free when the season kicks off. There is just a thing here where like live sports is the last thing that can bring everyone together. Like it's not even award shows anymore because no one's seen any movies. Yeah. Like there's just a thing here that's like really happening. And it's at the end of this, you're kind of like, man, that,

We're going to be paying substantially more than cable bundles ever were. Oh, yeah. And there was a there was a great thing going around the other day after all this got announced, because to your point, that's you just named three new places to watch football this coming season. And now it's like you're up to legitimately like 10 streaming services you're going to need if you want to watch all the games online.

next year of the NFL season. Because like Netflix has Christmas games again. They're spread across all the different services again. Like it's awful. And it's only going to keep getting worse because that, to your point, is the only thing that these companies have found that lots and lots of people will reliably go to on purpose and jump through whatever hoops they have to. Like I will do whatever is required to watch football is only true about football and basically nothing else. There's also something interesting there.

In that I can't think of anything else where like the rights are so spread out like that, right? Like it's not like YouTube can get one Spider-Man movie. Like that's just not a thing, right? With IP. But the licensing deals for all the different networks are so spread out and split up that you have the situation where I have no idea why YouTube was only able to acquire one NFL game. But people are going to go find it there because they like it.

They like the NFL. They're going to watch it. And you just can't do that with anything else since they're able to get the property onto their platform. And it just works like beyond the fact that, yes, obviously, sports is incredibly popular and people would watch no matter what. Well, also, you know, the rights holders are are differently situated. So if you are like it's funny because.

Disney owns everything now. But at the time, if you were Marvel, you could sell Spider-Man to Sony and X-Men to Fox and the rest of the characters. You would make your own weird movies on with Jon Favreau. And that turned out to be a really big deal. And they didn't know what would work and what wouldn't work, right? Sports leagues...

Every game is like it has a value in a moment of time, and then that value goes to zero. And so they are very much incentivized to not sell like franchises or long-running things to let people go and try to get value out of over time. They're very much incentivized to be like, all right, you can have Thursday and you can have Sunday and you can have the slate of games during the week because after it's done, there's no residual value.

Right. They have to make an event of it. And that incentivizes them because they paid for that day. Because when it's over, it's done. There's no catalog value. And you can see they don't even really care about like old highlights. Right. They're just like, whatever, you can have it because all that is just advertising for whatever's going to happen next. In a way that like, you know, Marvel gets tons of values from Avengers Endgame continuing to exist forever.

And it's like, it's just a very different posture for the leagues. And they are, they have become incredibly good at milking it in a way that I would say has forced many people to consider sailing the stormy seas. And, and it's easier and easier all the time to do so. But no, I mean, and you look at it. You can get a boat for nothing. And like the way that you get,

All of this stuff is like the NFL in particular has done a really good job of getting around its own contracts. Like they keep coming up with new days to have games. They keep calling the games new kinds of things. They keep putting them in new places because they're

They have these incredibly specific deals about where things can be and when. And I mean, if you remember, it wasn't all that long ago that Verizon had NFL games specifically on mobile, but you could only watch them on your phone because that was the deal that Verizon had made on mobile. So if you wanted to watch NFL games on your phone, you had to have Verizon. But if you had Verizon, you couldn't watch NFL games on anything other than your phone. Like the NFL is now worth so much money and it is the only thing that actually

actually can claim to be an event that way. Like you're seeing baseball deals go down and other sports leagues are going down in their deals because no one is tuning in in that way. And people will not jump through hoops to sign up for Amazon just to watch a Cincinnati Reds game anymore. But they will with football games. And so the price keeps going up and they keep finding new ways to slice and dice it. And it is truly, truly awful as a fan, but as a like,

Harvard Business School case study is like pretty spectacular. It is very funny that even the NFL is like slicing and dicing of its schedule into different days. The days have gotten reputations. Like you just know that you can drink your way through a Thursday night football game. Yeah.

the value of these different things it's funny how they just like sort themselves out alright we gotta we wanna end here again just to remind everyone the only thing David Zaslav has ever created is layoffs and Max was a disaster and he stole my child's name which I'm still pissed about but now it's back you're gonna name your second child HBO right just to really bring it full circle baby boy peacock Patel oh I like that

Naming this kid's hard. It's very challenging. I will accept your recommendations. Max actually has a very strong point of view, and she's going to win because we have nothing. We have nothing to stand up to her with right now. So let me know what you think. All right, we've got to take a break. We're going to come back. There's lots more to talk about on this episode of The Verge Cast. Support for the show comes from Charles Schwab.

Support for today's show comes from Liquid Ivy.

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You know that point in the afternoon when you just hit a wall? You don't have time for self-care rituals or getting some fresh air, so maybe you grab a beverage to bring you back. But somehow it doesn't do the trick, or it leaves you feeling even worse. What you need is a quality break, a tea break. And you can do that with pure leaf iced tea, real brewed tea made in a variety of bold and refreshing flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

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Seems generous, but I'll take it. We're going to do it. Lots and lots of news this week. Lots of gadget news. Lots of tech news. We got to start with like a finally. I feel like a finally is worth it. Apple has announced that what it is now calling CarPlay Ultra is going to arrive. It's shipping first on new Aston Martin cars. And then if you have a newer Aston Martin with the latest features,

infotainment system, you can go to your dealer and get a software update and then you too will have CarPlay Ultra. Then they announced there's coming a bunch of other car companies. Porsche is supposed to do it. They announced that Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis would also get it, which are new partners. No timelines in any of this stuff. CarPlay Ultra is a concept we've covered very closely.

Like so closely that when I was searching for our own coverage and I typed Nilay Patel CarPlay, Google generated a full AI summary of my opinions about CarPlay. Like there's a lot of us talking about CarPlay over the years. So several years ago, in 2023, I want to say, Apple announced next-gen CarPlay. And it was just a picture of the interior of a car with lots of screens. And it was all CarPlay.

And we're doing it. And they put up a slide. If you remember this, they put up a slide with like every car makers logo. And what we learned is that many of those car makers were surprised by their inclusion on this slide. Like they're like, what are you talking about? Yeah. Because they all had regular car play, which people like.

And Apple was just like, of course, of course, they're going to do what we tell them to do. They were not ready for this. A year later, last year, Apple had announced no partners for Next Generation CarPlay. They had said that Porsche and S-Mart would do it by the end of last year. And that didn't happen. And then like sneakily removed that mention from their website. Yeah, it was it's it got further and further away as time went on, it seemed.

And then they announced a bunch of technical details about how this next generation of CarPlay would work. I wrote a lot about that. I took a lot of meetings. I've had a lot of car company CEOs on Decoder and asked them straight up, are you going to do this? And most of them have said no. Famously, Mercedes CEO Ola Klonius said no. Rivian CEO RJ Scringe said no. We've had the heads of product from GM on. He was not impressed by this. Like, yeah.

there's a lot of car companies that are like, we are not going to give up our interface to Apple. Like we have our own ideas about software and services. You might think they're horrible ideas. And in many cases they are, but they are their own companies and they would like to own their own relationships with customers and that's just tacos. So Apple had to re architect all of this from, we're going to take over all your screens and,

CarPlay will be the future of the car to this literally multi-layered approach to what the car companies control and what Apple controls and all these like hybrid bits and bobs in the middle. It has taken them forever to get even one of these cars shipped with these deals in place. And the way I would characterize it is that it's a complete walkback.

Like they've, they're announcing CarPlay Ultra and yes, there's all this stuff you can do in the car with your phone now. But if you just take a minute to like look at what it is, you're like, oh, they, it's kind of nothing. Like, I don't want to be like too rude. It's, it's something. It was, I was just a long time in it, but they had to do it.

but the actual practical effect of it is so small. I'm genuinely confused what they have put in all of this work for. CarPlay makes a ton of sense. It is fantastic. You can use your phone to control things in your car. It gets rid of a bunch of the worst parts of car controls. CarPlay Ultra, do I need an iOS-themed speedometer? What else does it do? What does it do for me that meaningfully improves the car experience?

What does it do for Apple? So I know exactly what it does for Apple, which is as you're using your apps in the car and you're pushing the buttons in the apps, those apps are actually running on your phone and Apple is collecting its 30% cut. That's what it does for Apple, right? It puts their operating system and their business model front and center as you're operating your car. That's a big deal. That's their business. And it keeps the automakers from putting their business models front and center of the car, which is the entire tension.

GM's entire conception of itself right now is like, we're a software vendor. And it's like, are you? And I don't know if that's real or not, but that's what they want to do. They want to have services in the car. Tesla's conception of itself is very much as a software maker. So is Rivian's. They believe that they should own a customer relationship of people doing stuff in the car, particularly as a car store driving themselves. So for Apple, CarPlay Ultra is, if you're going to buy stuff in your car, we want 30%.

Apple, what else is their business model? I see. So this is a long play, right? Like I'm not, I'm not,

playing uh got angry birds in the car right now but like eventually you know it's and it'll it'll theme itself based on how fast my car is automatically driving right the idea is that there shouldn't be another software ecosystem that you participate in your company right you can kind of just straight line like people like carplay like we should do more with carplay and then there's this real tension in the industry

well, eventually the cars will drive themselves and we're going to turn all these screens into shopping malls and who gets the money and who gets the credit cards. And that's just going to play itself out. What the automakers have like really been wondering about is like, hey, we don't want all the cars to look the same, right? You get into an Aston Martin, it should look different than a Porsche. It should look different than a Hyundai. So we need all this design control, which Apple did not want to give up initially. And so they ended in this place where,

Where I suspect CarPlay Ultra will just stop being relevant very fast. Because what they've done is they've broken the car's UI into layers. And so there's one layer that runs locally on the car that has nothing to do with your phone that has been themed by Apple and the carmaker together. That's like your speedometer, your turn signals.

which you can't screw with federally, right? Like there's some stuff that you just can't connect to a phone. Like it has to be there. So then the automaker gets that locally. Then there's the first time you plug your, you know, your CarPlay phone into your CarPlay Ultra car, it like downloads a bunch of themes and graphics packages that Apple has designed in connection with the car maker, right? So I'm guessing what that means is Apple designed it for them. Yeah.

Like knowing Apple, they did it for the car maker and that downloads to your car. And then you get a bunch of themes for the speedometer and other stuff that are still local. Like the car is doing them, but the design comes over the air from Apple through your phone. And then you can like click through it. And then you get stuff like maps in the cluster and all this stuff. And then the last piece, which is I think super interesting because it's the thing that Apple I think had to give up is called punch through UI.

where the carmaker has a bunch of stuff that it wants to do. The rear view camera, the controls for a fancy audio system, the massaging seat controls, like a lot of this stuff where it doesn't want to make it twice, right? Here's whatever custom fancy feature we've built for this car. We don't want to redesign it with Apple. That just comes through CarPlay. It punches through the CarPlay interface. And so you push a button and you just see the carmaker's UI.

So now you have this like mishmash of stuff, which is exactly ends the promise of Apple will take over all the screens in your car. Because now it's gone from at least it's bad, but now it's because now it's gone from it's bad carmaker UI, but at least it's consistent to it's mostly Apple design stuff. And if you hit the wrong button, the carmaker's bad UI shows up and you've got to use that screen.

And I don't, I just like, don't know how that's going to play out. Do you remember back in the day with like smart TVs, everybody would do their really like overwrought skin on top of Android, but then you'd open up settings and it would just be like the basic honeycomb Android thing. Like that's what this is. And it's, it's not good UI, but I also feel like there's been this macro shift since Apple launched this the first time three years ago, uh,

people want buttons like this. I would just went back and looked at, uh, there's a, there's a picture in Apple's press release, happily announcing that it has launched CarPlay ultra, which sure, uh, compared to the picture that they showed off the, when it was called next generation CarPlay at WWDC back in 2022, it was even earlier than I remember. Uh, and, uh,

The thing from 2022 is just screens everywhere, right? So the way it imagines this is sort of one wide horizontal screen all the way across the front of the car and then big, huge infotainment thing in the middle that looks sort of like standard carplay only more so. That was the idea. And that was how everybody was showing off concept cars back in the day.

The Aston Martin one is a pretty small screen in the center of a console with a bunch of buttons. Like it just looks like a car screen. And so it's actually like a pretty small CarPlay display. And then Jake, to your point, the only new thing here...

is a speedometer that Apple designed that you can put, you can put Apple maps in the center of the instrument cluster so that you can see it. You get a little tiny heads up display. And there's a couple different color themes. Yeah. Like the ambition of this thing, at least as it's been rolled out now, again, there might be more cars, there might be other stuff going on, but at least this first instantiation of it is so much smaller than what Apple was pitching at the beginning that it's kind of, if it had just described this as

We would have been like, oh, sure, that kind of makes sense. That's cool. It's like an extension of the look of CarPlay onto the other screen that you look at in your car. But again, functionally, it is not, right? The thing you're going to get from We Skinned the Cluster is between the speedometer and the tachometer is a middle display that can show another view of CarPlay apps. Yeah. Which lots of cars already have now. Right. So like functionally, yeah, Apple designed the speedometer in the new S-Dimension.

It's like, oh, that's nothing. Right. And then the center CarPlay experience is still the same as it was. If you look at the picture, it's still just a grid of icons. It's not meaningfully new in that way, except some more controls have been integrated into CarPlay. And because of Punch3UI, you can push a button and adjust the fancy speaker system using the native interface of the CarMaker. But that was a click away before. Yeah.

Right. It wasn't that was just like functionally, it's not that much more different. Right. At all. If Apple had announced that in 2022, it probably would have shipped in 2022. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, if it had just explained it that way, the way that you just explained it, all the automakers on that slide would have been like, yeah, sure, fine, whatever. You want to you want to let it show Apple Maps between the speedometer and the tachometer while you're driving? Sure. Great. Fine. But and they did.

Because the original CarPlay, which by the way will continue. Yeah. They're just going to keep making regular CarPlay. This is CarPlay Ultra. That is going to continue where you still get mirroring of maps onto the center cluster. And lots of cars have that. And in fact, every time another car is launched with it, people have been confused about

Because they assume that that is next generation CarPlay. And we have run story after story being like, no, that's just regular CarPlay. Next gen CarPlay is when your phone begins to operate more like the interface of the car directly. Right.

Like all of the screens directly in this weird hybrid fashion are operated by with Apple design products that come from your phone. Right. The idea was that you should be able to control the temperature of the cabin through CarPlay. Right. And so that so that's one that's really interesting. Right. If you look at Apple's own designs, what an HVAC screen should look like, it's not some beautiful Johnny Ive reinvention of an HVAC screen. It's not Steve Jobs showing all the old smartphones and be like, here's why they suck. Like, here's the new it's just an HVAC screen.

Yeah. Like down to like the weird sliders and the sync button for the multiple zones. Like every car maker has, like they didn't actually do it right. It is just Apple design riff on a very standard HVAC screen. So if you're a car maker, when, as these cars come out, I would say the HVAC screen is the thing to look at to see how important this is because of the car makers give that to Apple. Then they think there's some value there. If they do the punch through UI, uh,

where they just show their own HVAC screen, you will know they do not give a shit. Yeah. That this is just another feature on the spec sheet. Every car YouTube review that I've ever watched, that literally whoever, it doesn't matter who it is, Doug DeMuro, Forrest Marquez on the Autofocus channel, they wave at the center screen and like, it has CarPlay and Android Auto and they just move on.

Because they don't care. Yep. Right? And like, that's how you will know that this thing matters or doesn't matter if everyone just punches through their own HVAC controls. But the other thing that has happened is we've gone back to buttons. Like again, you rewind three years ago and there was this idea that actually what we want is a car cabin full of screens. And overwhelmingly...

customers told car companies no you know what i want is buttons i want to i want to be able to feel the temperature control so that i don't have to look for it while i'm driving down the highway and like company after company has gone back to saying okay we're going to actually have physical controls in the car and i think there's one other thing driving i agree buttons are great buy a car with buttons you know send the signal in the market that you know be the hero america needs um

But also a bunch of these car makers put in all these screens and they realized they had no idea what to do with them. Right. At all. Even that car play, that first car play I made from 2022, it has like five calendars on it.

Because they just didn't know what to fill the pixels with. They're like, another clock widget. That'll do it. And, you know, the thinking is like some applications will be developed to fill these screens and there's nothing. You're so right. It has a music widget that is just like the progress bar of the song that is, it's got to be three feet wide. Yeah, it's incredible. Yeah.

You know, we have a passenger screen in our Grand Cherokee. We've never turned it on. I had all these dreams that Becky would drive me around. I would watch football on the passenger screen. And it's like five HDMI dongles later. I'm like, nope, I'm just going to watch it on my phone, which is almost as big as the screen. I test drove a Cadillac Vistic for a weekend. It's great. It's their new three-row electric EV. I'm going to write about it. It's a great car. It has a huge screen in it.

Like one of those big curvy Cadillac OLEDs. And I was just like, what is all this? What do you, I have three maps open right now. I have a three foot podcast time elapsed slider. Like, what is this for?

The new Escalade IQ, which is even bigger and has even more screens. You're like, oh, this is it's 10. It's 10 maps. Like maybe maybe like three different app applications. Why not? Let's have a good time. And I think they realize the utility of these screens was dropping. Like there was nothing to use them for. Really? People weren't using apps and shopping on them. And the customers were like, we hate touching these screens. Yep.

And yeah, I think Apple got caught into that like larger trend, but I also think they, they just oversold what they were trying to do. And all the carmakers, like, why would we give you our customers this way? And all the customers were like, I don't care about any of this. And we still get a lot of notes whenever we cover CarPlay. I'm not a CarPlay fan. I, we, we use it in our older cars. I bought a box. I have this like 2016 Mercedes C43. It does not have any, like it's the worst screen in the world.

And I bought a box. I literally unplugged the radio and I bought a box that sits. You plug the radio into the box and the box into the screen and it hijacks the screen to put CarPlay on it. That's great. That's like I upgraded. It's a total hack. And that's like fine, right? Sure. But we don't use it in our cars that are good. Like my not garbage cars. We don't use this thing. And there's a lot of reasons for that. And kind of the number one is...

CarPlay is a single application interface. You can get widgets, right? So you can have a music player and the map open at the same time, but they're both widgets. They're not actually the apps. Right. And what we want is the map open and the music player open so you can like share with it. So we just mount a film like everyone does. And this doesn't solve that core problem. Hold on. Hold on. Statistically, everyone uses CarPlay. This is not true.

It's not true. Lots and lots of people. Now I'm just going to issue bug requests to Apple. What is the show for? So if you look right now on various support forums, they just changed CarPlay so that no matter what you're doing on your phone, it happens in CarPlay. And the thing that a lot of people had figured out was you could take Google Maps out of CarPlay.

You can open a CarPlay preferences on your phone and you can take Google Maps out. Oh, sure. You just hit the minus button. So then you have Google Maps open on your phone and your music or podcast or whatever running on CarPlay, which was the number one use of CarPlay. When we hear from listeners or readers about why they like CarPlay, it's I have 45 audio apps. Yep.

Right. I have whatever e-book reader I'm doing. I'm not my podcast apps like they're all perfect. I don't want to mess with them. I don't want to log into GM's weird Android instance. Like I just want to use my apps. I curated my phone. They all have CarPlay. They go on that screen. That's fine. And then a lot of people were taking Google Maps out so they could basically have two monitors. Yeah. And they would not the phone with Google Maps and they would have the music and CarPlay and Apple broke it.

So you can take Google Maps out and then the phone is still like, no, we're sending this to CarPlay. And there's like furious forum posts about it because that's a lot of people were still using that to have two different screens at once. Sure. Including me. And I'm very annoyed about this. I'm just complaining about my almost 10 year old car. It gets me nowhere with anyone. But like there's there's something there that's really powerful that Next Generation CarPlay doesn't solve.

But that even like GM's like crazy, like giant curved screen kind of solves because you can put Google Maps in the cluster and it's just Google Maps. And then you can have the music player and it's really big. And it's like, oh, with all the screens, just let me run two apps at once. And they haven't quite gotten there. Maybe they will one day. I mean, this is from the company that makes the iPad. Are you shocked by this fact? Again, it's like your point about buttons is there, but it's like, oh, man, they put in all these screens in the car and they forgot to build any apps for them.

And they forgot the number one, like, why do people have three monitors? It's not to run one big app. Like, you want to run, like, that's why you want lots of windows. Like,

I want three linear feet of one app in my car. I just want to call one thing out. Apple gave one publication early hands-on with CarPlay. I believe it was Top Gear. We embedded the video. Top Gear, you can watch it. It's great. Almost everything is our reporting. Like down to like Mercedes CEO, that's us, that's Decoder. And then the explanation of that video, that's us. We wrote that story.

Again, when you just ask Google about CarPlay, it's like, Nila hates it. It's very fun. So we're going to get our own hands-on soon. I'm excited to play with it. WWC is coming up around the corner. Very interesting they announced this weeks before WWC. In another world, this is a highlight announcement, right? And there's an Aston Martin sitting there, and everyone does hands-on with the Aston Martin. But they announced it early. You wonder if they're going to have more at WWC or if this was a distraction from that. All right. I can continue complaining about CarPlay. Let's not.

Are you sure? I got another 20 minutes. That's what decoder is for. That's true. Go watch, literally no shade to Top Gear people. It was just very funny. It's a good video. I was like watching this video. I was like, oh, that's just, that's source testing. There was one thing in that video that I really appreciated, which is that he too is confused about

When it's wired CarPlay and when it's wireless CarPlay, because he plugged it into his car and it launched the thing that said set up wireless CarPlay. And it's like, which one did I do here? Which is a feeling that I have constantly all the time. Next, CarPlay Ultra is only wireless. That plug-in is just the initial download of assets. So you plug in your phone. The phone is like, I've got a library of assets for car makers.

that Apple has designed with everybody. We're going to go update the database of assets and then download the right ones to your car. I so fundamentally do not believe in the idea that I should have to have an iPhone in order for my car to work properly.

Like you're just, that's, this is, this is the problem with CarPlay Ultra that I have always had is that does not make sense to me. The fact that my car is somehow not feature complete unless I own an iPhone is just backwards. Like, this is the other thing that's, that why is Apple in this? They could, they could just throw in an iPhone for the cost of an Aston Martin. I,

That's not a huge...

we have done something wrong as a society. Fundamentally, I agree with you and you are correct. As somebody who primarily experiences cars via rentals, it drives me crazy when it has a baked in thing. I just write my phone has everything on it. It's fully up to date. It has all my preferences. Boom, plug it in. Easy done. I am like I find that to be just delightful. Sure. You are correct that a car should function.

David, I can get you in a 2008 DB9 for $17.5 tonight. And then I can buy the CarPlay screen on TikTok and we're good to go. I'm cooking. All right. Just in honor of the fact that it's a virtual cast, I'm going to quickly shop for Cadillac Escalades while David moves on to whatever's next. We should talk about the Android announcements just for a couple of minutes here. So Google I.O. is next week and

I think Google just has a lot of other AI stuff to talk about. So they just did all the Android stuff early. They announced a bunch of new stuff for Android 16, including a whole new design language that they call Material 3 Expressive, which is a stupid name for what I think is actually like a very cool looking thing. Like, it's just really funny that looking at phones, they've gotten so much more like

very sterile and straightforward over time. And Google is like, what if it was like playful and colorful and everything was purple? And it's very Gen Z. And I'm like, very cool and young. So it worked for me too. And I just I don't know, I like it. They're making the animations more playful. There's a lot more for developers to do in terms of like fonts and widgets and sizes and shapes of things. And users can customize it a lot. And

I've given Material You kind of a hard time over the years because it was just like, oh, your wallpaper has some brown in it. What if everything was brown? But there's something about this and the idea that actually, yeah, I should be able to make everything look

the way that I want instead of just Apple's weird idea about tinting that I've come to really like. And I think Google is like onto something here. Yeah. The new design is really fun. I am a little skeptical of the implementation. Material you, it is not a big jump from material you, right? It is fundamentally the same thing, just made a little bit wackier. And if you use lots of different things on an Android phone, you know,

The implementation of Material U has not changed, I think, basically at all since it was announced like four years ago, right? It's the same five widgets, right? And you still see in the Material 3 expressive, whatever it is,

you know, demo slides that they're showing, it is the same weather widget and the same clock widget that we saw four years ago, right? Those are still on my home screen because those are the only widgets that theme themselves properly, right? Like I really want a step counter widget, right? Google owns Fitbit.

They have Google Health or whatever it's called. Neither of those have a material expressive whatever widget, right? A lot of apps now do support the icon theming, which is great, but not all of them do. And there is something truly awful, by the way, about when your home screen has a bunch of apps that all fit the theme and then two

like two that haven't updated. And it just there's nothing that kills a vibe quite like the one app that steadfastly refuses to play nice with the operating system. Yeah. And I think like unlike on it, look, Apple has made some I think some errors with the way they have done theming. But I do think that one thing Apple has to

to its advantage is when they do something, their developers listen. And so when Apple changes the theme of its operating system, which we may see next month, I suspect you'll see a lot of app developers moving forward to update and theme in that style to reflect what the operating system is supposed to feel like.

And I don't know using Android apps that most of them reflect the feeling of Material You or Material Design or whatever's coming next. Android feels different and it's nice and I think it looks lovely. And there are places where those effects

are able to be added into third-party apps, right? Like I see the little squiggly playback line on the Spotify widget in the notification shade. It's great, it's nice. I wanna be clear, like I think the design is really fun and I think the Android has become sort of a much more like lively looking operating system in that way than iOS. But I think like coming up with this big design refresh is step one and step two is following through with it.

It is having people make widgets. It is having people support theming. And Google did not do that with Material You. And it is not clear to me that they have a push behind Material 3 Expressive either. So that is where my skepticism is, and I'm...

I hope I hope that they are able to, you know, get some people on board with it because it would be really fun and delightful to have all my icons be the same color and have all these fun, you know, widgets. The bar is on the floor. Yeah. All my icons be the same color. Right. It's not happening. This to me is so indicative of how weirdly Google has started to handle Android like for so long.

Android had versions that it launched that were a thing. Like, Google would do a bunch of updates to Android at once and be like, look, a new version of Android that had a dessert name. Like, it was a thing, and that has just stopped. Now, like...

We don't even really pay attention to new versions of Android anymore, which is like maybe a failing of ours, but I think it's mostly a failing of Google's. No, no, no. I mean, this is the thing. A couple years back, we were like, hey, we reached out to Google. We're like, hey, did you guys say the word Android during this Google I.O. keynote? And they're like,

Uh, you know, I think it's OK that we had we had missed, but they were specifically not mentioning Android version numbers because they want to blur it. They want it to just be like they're the iterative things. Well, it's because it is such a disastrously fragmented thing that if if they don't tell you what version number it is, you can't put up the chart with how low the updates have been to that version number. Right. And like Apple made such a meal out of it every year showing all

all of the phones that have been updated to the new iOS versus all of the phones that have been updated to the new Android. And it was always ugly. And I think Google just rather than try to fight, just kind of gave up and decided to hide. And I think that is a bummer. There is a back and forth there, right? The cynical view, which is correct, but cynical, is it,

Google is largely a base operating system supplier to Samsung, at least expressed in this country. Sure. Samsung is all the Android market share. And it doesn't matter what material three expressive is because Samsung is going to put one UI on top of Android and that's what you get. Right.

And all that really matters is does Google push security updates fast enough for the people with Samsung phones as the operating system vendor? And the capabilities of each successive operating system version are now very small, even in the iOS world, right? The real differences between iOS 13 and 14 are nothing, right? It's nothing. Like there's some stuff your phone will insist on summarizing your text messages, even if you turn Apple intelligence off.

That's a feature that exists on iOS now. But the sort of like incremental value to app developers, to users for successive operating system versions

is just smaller and smaller every year. - Yeah. - Okay, so that's like the very cynical view. Like Google has blurred these version numbers because really it just has to provide base Android to Samsung, which will then do one UI stuff and it doesn't matter 'cause the whole point of Android is search volume. - Sure. - And now maybe Gemini queries, right?

There's a whole industry about that. The less cynical version of this is that actually creates freedom for Google's design team to say it all looks different now. Right. We're pushing the boundary of what Android can look like and feel like with things like material three expressive because no one will be mad at us when we change it because no one has it. Right. A bunch of pixel owners will be excited because they signed up for this.

This is why you buy a Pixel. At the end of the day, it's to get Google's vision of Android. So if we make it different, they'll be excited because they got something no one else has, and that will create whatever exclusive you're on Pixel. I don't know if that actually works out, but that's the argument you would make. It's like the less cynical argument of the opportunity that's created by the fact that Samsung is the volume player in Android, and Google can be like the very tip of the spear. Has Google done a great job being the tip of the spear of the Android ecosystem? It has not. No.

And I think that's the opportunity they're missing. Those can both be true at the same time, right? Google has lost control of its destiny in that way. But it has moves it can do even as kind of a bit player in its own universe. That's so sad. I mean, that's what it is. And that's fine. But I think, Jake, to your point, the challenge for Google has been to...

like propagate its good ideas. And I think just pitting what Google launched this week next to all of the stuff we've seen about what's coming from iOS, which is this like Vision Pro based, everything in sort of 3D space, even more like cold and sterile and space agey look, I vastly prefer Android. Like the ideas about what your phone should look like, I resonate with what Google is up to so much more than what Apple is up to.

But until and unless you get at least enough people to buy into this, that it feels coherent and good, it's going to feel the way Android always has, which is like a mishmash of a decade's worth of ideas. And that feels bad. And so it's like that Google has always struggled to get to that tipping point where it's like, okay, I actually understand what this thing is trying to do. And it feels consistent no matter where I am. And Android never feels consistent.

They have guaranteed that the home screen on Pixel phones is going to look really cool for the next three years. Yes. And I think it's very possibly going to end there. And I hope it doesn't. But that is what it is. Yeah. No, I think that's right. And it's the thing Google is invested in.

in like a real way is making sure Gemini is everywhere. And Google is fine if you don't take its aesthetic ideas, but it is going to beat you up until you put Gemini everywhere. Or pay you lots of money, which it's paying Samsung lots of money. Yeah, it's going to beat you up with dollars. Just throw money at you. MrBeast at the YouTube upfronts, Mia Sato was at the upfronts and she said MrBeast got on stage and says, no one tells you how heavy money is, which is an all-time quote.

Because he's the one with suitcases full of money. And that's Google, right? They're like, Samsung, would you like to know how heavy this money is? Do you think he understood the true emotional depth of that sentence? No one understands how heavy money is. He's like, wow. It's very good. Jimmy.

We'll see. I mean, I'm excited for IO. I think we're, you know, from everything we've heard, there's going to be a push towards, you know, Google's next set of platform ideas around AI, around mixed reality, around all this stuff. I think that stuff will be exciting. It's weird because Material 3 Expressive, there's an argument that skeuomorphism is coming back. Right? These like very tactile, very real feeling textures. And I don't know how that plays with all of the other kinds of experiences that all these companies want to build.

You don't want a bunch of like leather and felt in your AR glasses. Like that's really weird. That's just super goofy. And I think that's why Apple is headed towards this like sterile, like literally it looks like aero glass from Windows back in the day, right? Like they're headed towards computer interfaces because if you want the real world to come through your glasses, you want computers on top of it. And Google's in this other direction. And we'll just see. I'm sure they have some idea about how it comes together. That's kind of what I'm interested to see at IAO.

Yeah, agreed. All right, we should move on. Wait, hold on. Before we move on, we just need to just brief shout out to the public reemergence of our good friend and former colleague Dieter Bohn, who was on stage.

virtual stage stage quote unquote stage doing stuff and boy were people excited to see Dieter yeah basically just doing phone hands-ons yeah he just did phone hands-ons he just was he remains Dieter it was nice he's and he was like the surprise treat at the end of the video you should go watch it it's great yeah but he's like look this one opens that one closes it's very good

Dieter still loves phones and I will forever love Dieter for loving phones. Yeah. I'm excited for IO. I assume IO this year, this is next week, is just going to be Gemini talk like top to bottom. Like here's everything we do better than chat GPT. Yep. That is certainly the vibe that I'm getting from all the rumors and reporting so far is like,

Google is, I think, clearer than ever about what it's about as a company. And the thing that it is about is Gemini. Feel about that however you want. But Google is going to the pivot to Gemini is very, very real. There's this got unearthed in the docs of one of the Google trials, internal notes from Google meetings that they are thinking of redoing the entire search stack with an LLM as the base. Oh, wow.

This is a big deal. That's where we're at with Google and Gemini. Yeah. So we're going to go there. I'll be there. Our team will be there. Lots of interviews, lots of hands-on, lots of probing questions about whether the web. That's my job at Google. I just walk around being like, what about the web? We'll see how it goes. Love this. It's going to be great. All right. We got to take a break. We'll be back with the lightning round. Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

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I have a lot to say about what's going on in the world of advertising. I always say that we're unsonsored for flavor because I want people to think when they hear sponsor integrations, oh, there's less flavor here. You can't pay to tell us what to do. You can't read our ethics policy. Our ethics policy is basically you can't tell me what to do.

Which if you can get into a line of work where the thing you're selling is the inability of anyone to tell you what to do, like I highly recommend it. I'm not saying digital media is a great or stable career, but one thing it does offer is the ability to say you cannot tell me what to do. It's good. That's what I like about it. And that's what we sell here. Subscribe to The Verge. That's what you're buying from us.

Everything else is turning into the worst kind of marketing integrated sponsorship that I can possibly think of. And it's like everywhere now. So we were talking about Warner Brothers Discovery up front and all these media companies are having them. Warner Brothers launched Storyverse this week.

Where you can just buy their like IP library and make ads out of it. I hate this so much. Like, you know, they did Bateman versus Batman. That's part of story verse where like State Farm showed up and they're like, we'd like to buy some Batman stuff. And Warner Brothers is like, yeah, you can make ads out of this. That's what this is for. It's to turn it into advertising. And now they've done a couple of these pilots. And I'm not saying these ads were bad.

But like their business model is now we make this IP and you can show up and turn whatever is in our catalog into advertising.

This is the thing that makes the most sense of all of the Zaslav actions, right? Like it all comes back to this, right? Like, oh, we have things that people like that we can wring more money out of. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's funny. They announced this name change and we were looking at all their press releases and Emma, who like was covering this as like the actual story here is this ad product.

Where their catalog, the whole Warner Brothers catalog is now able, like it's for sale to be remixed into advertising. Yeah.

That's what it's for. We're so few steps away from, and we've uploaded a bunch of assets for you to use generative AI to just make ads against. It's right there. Put this right next to Mark Zuckerberg's thing that he was talking about where he's like, we're going to let you make AI ads. And it's like, we're going to let you make AI Batman ads. It's like, it's just right there. And it's right there. It's been there in the background of all these companies for a long time. So NBCU, Comcast, our favorites, they're

their sponsors for SNL 50 this season were getting sketches on air. Right. So like Maybelline was a big sponsor and they did a bunch of stuff with the cast and VW was a big sponsor. And every episode of SNL had that sketch, the Californians. Yep. But it was just a VW, but that was marked as advertising. You know, that sketch, the Jennifer Coolidge, Ariana Grande, everyone's Jennifer Coolidge sketch. Yep. I think Dana Carvey was in it. Maybelline.

Maybelline is a title sponsor of SNL 50 and they got a sketch on air. Oh, wow. That went viral because it was very funny. But that's just integrated brand advertising. And what is that sketch? It's just all of them saying Maybelline 50 times. Like what? And that's whatever. It's a comedy show. Fine. Integrate the brands. Product placement. All you want. Okay. Here's the last one. This one like drove me over the edge this week. There's a new documentary, F1 documentary on Netflix about Kimi Antonelli, the new driver for Mercedes. Yeah.

It is literally a WhatsApp commercial. Like when you open it on Netflix, the interface, you know, where it says like what the show is about, the first words are sponsored by WhatsApp. It doesn't even tell you what it is. Like literally the first things you see are sponsored by WhatsApp.

And then it's like the story of Kimi Antonelli taking over Lewis Hamilton's seat in the Mercedes. And then you start the show and, you know, it's just like a 40 minute documentary about like a 17 year old kid getting to drive a car. Like this is catnip for me. And like in the title sequence, it's like presented by WhatsApp. And then the, the,

The doc is tons and tons of fake WhatsApp conversations and staged WhatsApp video calls. Oh, that's really weird. Right. So everything you said until that is like, I'm like, fine, whatever. Like, get your money to make your documentary however you want.

Art and commerce. Sure. Knock yourself out. But then. Yeah. Toto Wolf calls Kimi Antonelli to tell him to take, you know, he's getting the job. And the first words he said in that call are we've set up this WhatsApp call. Oh, my God.

Brutal. Also, the video quality I call horrible. Horrible advertising for WhatsApp. And I like posting on Blue Sky about this. Some people are like, race cars are all about advertising. And the TeamSpeak button on the steering wheel of Mercedes is a WhatsApp icon because they have a long... Fine, whatever. Get your bag. I don't care. I'm just saying the actual content is advertising now. Yeah. These things have collapsed.

Like we are just viewing advertising to the point where the first line of the description of the thing is this is a WhatsApp commercial. And then you watch and you're like, oh, this is super a WhatsApp commercial. I have a friend who's been in like every kind of video production, like movies, TV shows, advertising. And he's like the end of this is someone is going to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. And the producer who accepts the award will be an advertiser.

Right. The end of this collapse of everything turning into marketing. Everything is an ad for everything on YouTube is an ad for AG1. Like that's all it is. Like everyone's just trying to build these channels so that they can do branded content integrated in the thing. And at the end of it, you're going to be like best picture goes to Coca-Cola. This is his theory. And I have laughed at him for years. I watched this WhatsApp thing. It feels kind of right. Anyway, unsponsored for flavor. Do you know what I mean? So, okay. There's a weird thing. WhatsApp can't tell me what to do.

This whole conversation, we're going to run this episode as a WhatsApp video call. I have said WhatsApp and Maybelline a lot. We don't even get paid for it. Maybe we're the idiots. I mean, in many ways, we are the idiots. Everyone else is driving their Aston Martins around.

That's all I'm saying. I'm buying $200 boxes from Amazon to retrofit CarPlay into my 10-year-old car. It's a very different world we live in. But I much prefer not being told what to do. And I assure you, all the people who do these integrations, they get told what to do. The best career advice I ever got was from somebody who told me that every time you do well in your career, you're going to get to choose between power and autonomy, and you should always choose autonomy. That's pretty good. It's good advice.

Anyway, if you'd like to continue to support us just yelling at companies and not being able to be told what to do, you can subscribe to The Verge. That's the engine that powers this whole little operation. That's how Neil gets his ass in Martin. Look, I'm telling you right now, I can get you into a 2007 Escalade with 159,000 miles on the clock for $89.95, David. I mean, I'm down. We go splitsies, the three of us. If you want to go up model, if you want to spend a little bit more, I get you into 2014 Platinum.

Platinum Slade now, 98K on the clock, 16.9. No. I think we go smaller because we're going to retrofit it as our mobile podcast studio. So you're going to rip out the inside? Yeah. We don't need the fancy stuff. Every time I despair about the car industry, I remind myself that you can just buy an old Escalade for no money, and that is a viable option. It's like the best thing you can do with your car budget is be like, I'm buying an old Escalade.

I'm not saying because it's like a great or reliable car that the previous owners have treated them well. I'm saying that at any moment, if you're like, I'm a little in the dumps, you're like, I can just buy an Escalade. That does make, I feel better. Do you see what I'm saying? That's real. Like I can get one. $89.95. All right, David, it's time. Oh my God. Now we have a countdown of these. We only get to do so many of these until we have to stop for a minute. Both of my children will be doing them. It's time for America's favorite podcast within a podcast.

Brendan Carr is a dummy. All right. This week on Brendan Carr is a dummy. We have what I can only describe is a moral dilemma.

Unlike, I guess the other ones are not moral dilemmas. It's just moral outrage. It's moral outrage. Usually in Brendan Carr is a dummy. We present but one story, which is Brendan Carr, who is a traitorous moron, shows up and says, I would like to use the power of the government to chill your speech. And then we point out the First Amendment exists and Brendan's ideas are bad and that he should feel bad about himself. And then we essentially threat invite him.

To come on the show and defend himself. Yeah. That's the structure of the thing. It's, you know, you buy the box of cereal, you get the marshmallows, everyone's happy. We sell what we sell here. That's the structure of Running Cars. Love it. I'm aware, right? You got a hit product. You got to sing your hits, you know? Today, this week, we're changing it up. All right? We're going country. Because I can't identify who the villain of the story is except for everyone. And then you have no idea what to do. So this week, our boy Brendan...

threatened to investigate Dish Network for not using the spectrum it obtained after T-Mobile bought Sprint and it was given Boost Network to run as our nation's fourth wireless carrier. Oh, we have a real worst person you know makes a great point kind of situation. You see what I'm saying? Don't worry, there's a twist coming. Okay. But that's the heart of it, right? Is Brendan woke up and he realized...

for a reason that I will come to, that it turns out Dish Network is not a viable fourth wireless carrier in the United States. That Project Gen5Sys, their plan to somehow use AWS and a technology called OpenRAN to very quickly build a fourth national wireless carrier came to nothing.

By the way, it's called Gen of 5-6 because they spelled Genesis with a 5. This is a real thing. I'm not kidding. We've done a lot of coverage of Project Genesis over the years, Project Gen of 5-6. And it has effectively come to nothing. It launched in like two markets with one phone, like a Motorola Edge.

We sent Mitchell Clark to use this phone back in the day, and he was like, this sucks. This is in 2022. Nothing has happened since. 2022. At one point, there was an entire crypto scam grafted onto the back of Project Genesis. Everything except building a network. And if you'll remember, this all came about because Brendan's predecessor at the FCC, Ajit Pai, under the first Trump administration, rubber-stamped T-Mobile buying Sprint.

And the solution they came up with to the reduction of competition in the United States was to say, okay, you can buy Sprint and you have to sell some spectrum and boost to Dish Network, which is going to wake up and realize that it's a viable national wireless carrier and preserve competition so that we will still have four national carriers in the country. This was their plan. They allowed this merger to happen, which resulted in thousands of layoffs and

and higher prices because we reduced competition. And they said, Dish Network will fix it. Dish Network is going to stand up a new network using this new technology called Open RAN.

Which is interesting. Open RAN is the idea that the hardware and software inside of a cell tower should be more interoperable. So like more companies can provide it. And this is the way you avoid big dependencies on a company like Huawei, which is controlled by a chain of government. This is a real problem. And the way we're going to do it is by making things interoperable to promote competition. That has not played out. I would just point out. Just like none of this happened. It was all a good idea. It's probably not the kind of stuff. Dish Network did not build the network. So Brandon has noticed this has happened. And he's like,

And he wrote a letter to Echo Star, which owns this network. And he said, I've directed agency staff to begin a review of Echo Star's compliance with its federal obligations to provide 5G service throughout the United States per the terms of its federal spectrum licenses. They hold a number of FCC spectrum licenses that cover a significant amount of spectrum. You haven't used them. Obviously,

Echo Star says it warned its investors that we have made a wireless network. No one can see it, but it's there. And then it, quote, cannot predict with any degree of certainty the outcome of the SEC proceedings. One, because I think it can predict the outcome. And two, because you can't predict Brendan. Right? Like, Brendan's going to be like, have you thought about being 25% more racist? You'll be fine. Like, that's like a normal outcome of a Brendan Korn investigation. Okay. So here's the twist.

First, Brendan is investigating a deal his own predecessor made and no one can predict the outcome, at least all the company. So that's one. That's weird, right? Why is Brendan doing this? Come on. You already know. Everybody knows why. Because SpaceX wants the spectrum and Brendan wants to give it to his buddy Elon Musk. This is getting so boring. It's like at least at least like I was genuinely in this moment rooting for Brendan to have like made a good decision that it's like and in the name of journalistic credibility, we're like, we got to give Brendan one this week.

But no. But I don't know. It's true that I've railed against Dish Network. Sure. Stupid idea for years. But where did this come from? What's the evidence that Brendan is tying this investigation to? SpaceX said one of its satellites measured the power spectral density levels in the bands that Dish Network has and found the dishes use of those bands is diminished, diminished the best.

So just SpaceX is like, look, hey, we took it upon ourselves. We pointed one of our satellites at the entire country, measured the spectrum usage, and trust us, bro, they're not using it, so can we have it? And Brendan immediately fired off a letter saying you're not using it. I vote for an investigation. SpaceX says, SpaceX said the spectrum that Dish is using remains ripe for sharing among next generation satellite systems that seek to finally make productive use of the spectrum for consumers and first responders. First of all.

The spectrum was being used before they sold Sprint to T-Mobile and gave the spectrum to Dish Network. I'm not saying Sprint was a great company. They sucked in a variety of ways. But it was, in fact, using the spectrum. But it was using the spectrum. You could use Sprint. People did. And then finally make use of this spectrum for consumers and first responders. It's like, yeah, all the other companies exist. Yeah.

Like if you would like to get first responders better cell coverage using the spectrum, you would give it to one of the companies that actually operates a wireless network, right? That would be the outcome. You wouldn't be like SpaceX. Can you horsepower up a new solution the same way you ask dish network to horsepower up a new network? What are we doing here? So we'll see what happens. There's we'll link. There's a bunch of reporting about this. We'll link to it. But this weekend, Brandon Carr is a dummy. He has done the right thing.

For the stupidest possible reason. And the funniest thing about this is it's his predecessor's deal. They promised us when they made this deal, allowing T-Mobile to buy Sprint, the Dish network would meet its commitments to stand up a fourth wireless network using the spectrum, using the boost assets. And everyone knew, just like we knew with Max, that this would never happen.

Never in a million years would this happen. And every time we reported on it and the reporting consisted of we're going to go to Las Vegas and see if there's a wireless network. They would be like, you don't know what you're talking about. Ridiculous. Yeah. Don't let the mergers happen. This is just more merger chaos.

Do you know what the best thing to happen to the American wireless industry is? The single best thing that's happened in the past 15 years to the American wireless industry, AT&T was blocked from buying T-Mobile. Yeah. That's by far the best thing that happened to the American wireless industry. And then they uncarriered. Yep. And they hired John Ledger and they...

AT&T had to pay a bunch of money in a breakup fee to T-Mobile. So T-Mobile got recapitalized. Important, important piece of the puzzle. But that only happened because they were blocked from buying it. And then John Ledger showed up and said, what is this industry? I have to be competitive now. I'm going to do a bunch of stuff to make this industry more competitive.

to win some customers and try to succeed instead of just cashing out and letting AT&T burn money, making four, four, three gray scale Batman movies compete. It makes everything better. As always, I would respond to the many critics who show up to say that, you know, just some woke DEI hire by pointing out that the only consistent opinions that I expressed on the show regarding politics or that free markets are good competition makes for better products. And you should be a little bit less racist than Brendan.

And that's all I'm really asking for. And if you think that's super liberal, that's fine. But I don't know about that. Anyhow, that's been Brennan Karsadani. Brennan, as always, if you have the wherewithal, the emotional fortitude, or even the raw intelligence to show up and defend these back-ass words decisions, you're welcome on our shows.

the fanciest CEOs in the industry show up undercover and defend themselves to me and they're able to do it. I don't think you can do it. I don't think you're going to show up. I think you're a dumb coward. But if you want to, the door is always open, my friend. Maybe he has Project Gen of 5, sis, and just like can't access this podcast. Yeah, he's out there collecting one quarter of an NFT at a time every time he sends a text message on his Boost mobile phone. That's been Brennan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast.

It was a great one. I treasure them all even more now, knowing we will have to take a break because God help Jake if he has to do this every week. I'm going to have Nili just like do a little voice memo on his phone. I assume he'll, you know, have some crazed moment in the middle of the night when he needs to let out some steam. We'll just play that right into the mic. Can you imagine if you could send a letter to the FCC being like, I've graded my own homework and I should get the spectrum. I mean,

We should have just been putting that at the end of all of our articles. Like, hey, this dish thing isn't happening. Can you give it to us? Like, we'll use it. Yeah. It's just very funny that you pointed a satellite in America and just measured this guy's usage. It's like, you don't have to do that much work, man. You just have to be like, does this exist? Yeah. You can go to the website, projectgenofivesys.com. It's still there. It's called thegenofivesys5g.com.

And the last media and press update, like the newest one is from 2022. And the headline is Dish adopts Verica's chaos engineering platform to test and ensure reliability. It's like, oh, God. First of all, chaos engineering is the new name of our product design firm. And I'm very excited about it.

It's like teenage engineering, but much worse. It's chaos engineering, and that's us. I'm into it. I believe it's a riff. You know, on Netflix, you said the Chaos Monkey. Oh, yeah. Which was its reliability tester where it would simulate just people pulling servers out of the racks. I think that's what this is, but it's just very funny that they put out a press release. I don't know, man. Anyhow, Brandon, if you're listening, I can get you into a 2015 Cadillac Escalade Luxury for $18,700.

Out the door. All right. Let's talk. Yeah. All right. We need a power cleanser here, David. What do we got? Can we talk about Airbnb, which is like all the only thing I can think about the last 48 hours. Uh, so Airbnb this week, uh, basically like it wants you to think it completely pivoted the company and,

And Brian Chesky is out here. Stephen Levy had a big piece in Wired. Amazing photos in that piece. Oh, they're very good. And it says the headline is something like Airbnb is in midlife crisis mode, which I'm sure Airbnb is not wild about. But it's kind of true. And it describes this like fever dream that Brian Chesky had in which he...

decided to completely change what Airbnb is doing. Ironically, in the middle of all of the open AI chaos that we covered, uh, he was like a central figure in sorting all this stuff out. And, uh,

was like somehow inspired by this to go create similar chaos at his own company so they go through this whole thing and Airbnb is now trying to pivot hard into being more than just like places to stay but they're doing like experiences which they've kind of done in the past but they're doing much more aggressively now and then services like local services where you are I guess and

I just find this all very weird. Like Airbnb seems to want to be fancy Yelp. But with transactions in it, that's the difference. You never transact in Yelp, right? Yelp is a search engine and you're like, find me a hairdresser. And then it like shows you a list and there's reviews and whatever, but you don't like do anything else. You just use it. And people have ever listings. This is very much more like, um, I need a haircut.

I'm going to open Airbnb and some like vetted barbers and hairdressers will be available to me and they will come to my house and cut my hair. While you're on vacation? While you're on vacation or if not. Which is like, yeah. I do think the single most interesting thing that they changed here is when you open the app, there's three tabs. It is like places to stay,

experiences services. The default tab that it opens to is the experiences tab, which is just not what Airbnb is known for. So I think like you're right, they are pushing this very hard. And there's a world where you just open this and you order a private chef for the night to your house where you live, even when you're not staying at

somewhere on vacation. I think it's sort of a weird concept, but it makes a lot of sense, right? Like if you're only using Airbnb for one thing, then it's only one, you know, thing, place that they can make money. But now if they can sell you experiences to do while you're in that place, if they can sell me experiences to do while I live here in New York City, like that is a

big new market for them. And that is actually that is a market no one is doing a very good job of. Like, I don't know if you guys ever have this experience, but I have it all the time where it's like, oh, what's going on near me this weekend?

And the answer is you check 58 websites and you end up on like an Eventbrite listing for a thing you've never heard of. And that's the best you can do. And at various times, different companies have tried to tackle the like what's going on around me problem. Nobody's ever done a very good job of it. And I think you're right, Jake, that there is a big opportunity and a big business there in being the one that is like,

So anywhere you are, even if it's at home, if you want to like explore and find stuff to do, come here. Airbnb makes a certain kind of sense as that platform, except that it's been trying to do that and failing for a really long time.

And so now to double down on that, but then also add like, I just don't know that I need I'm on vacation and I want to find a place to get a massage is like a unsolved problem. Right. And it's everything on there is like a little hokey right now. And admittedly, it's touristy stuff like it's fine. Right. But it's like do a pizza tour. Right.

Right. Get a photo in Times Square. I mean, you're in New York. That's what that's what you're here for. It's fair. You may as well do it there. But yeah, I'm not sure if that is what is going to solve it for people. Right. Like they have offered these things already and maybe just feels more legitimate because it's now like front and center in the app. It's certainly more convenient. Right. You were probably going to go on that pizza tour. I mean, I'm thinking about it. Right.

Brian Chesky is actually on Decoder tomorrow. As we're speaking, I'm preparing to interview him tomorrow about all this stuff. This is, I think, his third time on the show. He's great on Decoder. He loves explaining how he thinks. So I'm very curious if he's doing the same thing that I've seen from other companies. Like Uber just had an event this week. Dara Kostraszawi, the CEO of Uber, also taped a Decoder this week. And their whole thing is like route sharing and scheduling your commute and Uber One subscriptions. And all of these companies, they were kind of like,

push a button for a service one time or, you know, a few times a week or in Airbnb's case, like maybe a couple times a year. They're like, we want you to use this every day. Like that's how they're going to grow. They all think they're going to grow in this way. Like you need a relationship with Uber and you're going to schedule a commute in Uber that you do every single day and you're going to have this like ongoing relationship with Uber. That's a big part of their growth, right? For revenue anyway. Yeah.

It feels like the same move for Airbnb. Well, and in the same way that they're like, we have this core underlying technology that like Airbnb is fundamentally like a guest and host matching platform. Right. And it's like, if you, if you just expand that out, you get to, well, people need to book things and people need to have things booked. So sure. We'll do that. But like, there's a lot of those out in the world. I don't know. I just, I'm,

I am maybe you're right. Me lie that being the one that processes the payments and manages it all is, is meaningful. But I'm just not sure. I'm like, if I, if I want to find a place to have dinner near my Airbnb, I have a hard time imagining that the first thing I'm going to do is open the Airbnb app. Well, I mean, that's, that's their challenge. I got to teach people to do that. I think it's, I think that side of it is like different because you know, that there's 10 chefs available in my, my area. And it's like,

Yeah, I have no idea how to get a private chef, especially if I'm on vacation. And I think there's a lot of people that are like, okay, I've like, you know, my whole friend group is going to rent a house and it would be sick to have a private chef. And like, now it's a button. And like, if you can just build that muscle, that's like, oh, I could do that at home.

There's something there. Again, I'm excited to talk to Brian tomorrow. I share a lot of these same doubts. Will you ask Brian if he has any friends who aren't billionaires? Because the thing you just described is a billionaire problem. I don't think it's a billionaire problem. I think the reason people get big Airbnb houses is because if you can split the cost with enough people, it starts to feel reasonable.

Right. And I've never actually booked a private chef. I don't know if the math works the same way for private chef. I'm still scrounging pennies to buy a Cadillac Escalade for $89.95. But that's how that math works for a lot of people. Right. We can all get our own hotel room or we can pool our money and get a sick house for a weekend. Like I hear that all the time.

If you can add on to that, I mean, this is my entire thesis about limos in Las Vegas, right? Like it's no fun to be in a limo by yourself. Like that's the saddest you can be is drunk in Vegas alone in a limo. Like that, that is as Drake as I've ever felt in my entire life. But you, you put 10 people in a limo and they're like, this is the best experience I've ever had. Right. And there's just something about that that you can see them trying to tap into here.

I don't think it's I need to find a restaurant near me. I think I think it's some it's some other thing that's like, can we make this a little bit more special as a group? That's fair. And I can see that working. I just don't think that road is very long. Like there's just not the list of things that qualify under that rubric.

Just isn't huge. I do want to make one addendum to my limo comment, which is one year at CES, I got a Cadillac Escalade limo from the airport by myself and I took it to Shake Shack by myself. And that ruled. Las Vegas, the only city in America, in the world, I think, where you can just summon an Escalade limousine. You just walk outside of a building and be like, do you have a giant limo? And 10 guys are like, oh yeah, here I am.

You can't have that experience anywhere else in the world. That's what it's for. I mean, I know other people think Vegas has other purposes, but our listeners are there. That's it. That's the one. Yeah. That's what it's for. All right. We got to wrap this up. I'm going to ask Brian Jeske how many people he's ever, if he's ever been drunk alone in a little bit tomorrow. That's good.

Let me know if you've got your choice. By the way, party speaker update. Speaking of that, many, many, many photos of party speakers this week on transportation. We got one on an airport shuttle, which seems deeply rude. Like, don't do that. Confined spaces are not where party speakers go. Lots of Nashville bachelor party bike buses with party speakers on them. That's a thing. And then here's the thing I want to know, just to wrap this up. So many pictures of party speakers made by a company called ION.

which I believe is a house brand of one of the major retailers. I'm not sure. If you know what ION is, if you know who run ION, let me know. That's the next phase of our investigation. Because I think they'll talk. I've been trying to get onto the Sony party speaker team for years. Like, I've gone to the highest levels of the Sony corporation and been like, I know people in Japan, I will send them to the party speaker team. And they're like, not today. That's some, like, Apple Design Lab shit. You know what I mean? Like, the room where they put the cup holders in the party speakers. Yeah.

I think we got high on people. All right, that's it. That's Verge Cast for now. And that's it for The Verge Cast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week. ♪