Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of being unconstrained by truth, which is what we do here on the broadcast.
I'm your friend David Pierce. Nilay tells you in this media environment that we are the flagship podcast of that, because I don't... RFK started a podcast this week. You know what I mean?
It is a very high bar for being unconstrained by truth on a podcast. But we're here today. We're going to do our very best.
The Webby for being unconstrained by truth. The voting is now open.
That, of course, is a line from a New Yorker profile of Sam Altman that is deeply fascinating and has been making the rounds this week. We're going to talk about it. There's another big story about Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin, that's been going around that we're going to talk about. We have some Brevin stuff to talk about. We have some Anthropic stuff to talk about. We have a lot to talk about. All that is much less important than weird things Nilay and David have been doing on their computers this week. We also have a couple of housekeeping items for you. One is, please vote for us in the Webbies. The voting is open until next Thursday. We are currently winning for best technology podcast, but it's too close and it's making me uncomfortable.
Yeah, we're not winning by enough.
I would like to win in a way that hurts everyone else's feelings. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, I'd like to win in a way that we have to be good winners.
Right. It becomes incumbent on us to, like, give a nice speech acknowledging the others.
Yeah. Like if I was like, 'Oh my god, I'm so happy I won.' Like if you win by enough, if you don't nail the speech, you're a jerk. And I want to be in that position. I want that level of stress and pressure on the five-word Webby acceptance speech.
I would like to be required. I want the like Tom Brady, Michael Jordan level of success where we do so well that we still find haters and everybody's like, 'Wow.' The amount of rage and anger that you have to have to still find haters amongst all this success. That's what I want for us.
And then thrive on them, right? I think it's clear that I thrive on my haters, David. I don't know that we need to find any more.
It's true. People have been saying this about you. Also, the Verge movie night on April 27th is already sold out. Not only did the IFC Center have to bump us to the bigger theater to go see Sneakers with all of you, it's already sold out. So, A, very excited to see a bunch of you for Sneakers in a couple of weeks. B, I think this is officially a thing we're going to have to do again. So, keep an eye out. We're going to do more of these. It's going to be very fun. Last one in two Tuesdays, I think April 21st. We're going to do a whole Vergecast about the Verge and the Vergecast, the media business and journalism and AI and our feelings about everything. So, you and I are going to spend a whole episode answering as many questions as we can. We're going to loop in Helen, our publisher, to talk about the business a little bit. If you have questions about the Verge or the Vergecast or the state of media or why Nilay is like this, you can always call the hotline 86611, email us
[email protected], send all that stuff in. We're going to answer as many of those as we can in two Tuesdays. So, you've got a little bit of time, but not too much. Get all that stuff in as quickly as you can. That ends up being, I think, one of my favorite episodes to make. We do this like once a year, I would say, on average. It's very fun. Get all your questions in.
David, I have this like old school journalism, don't do inside baseball and make the story about yourself. And then you look at every famous creator and influencer, and they're like, 'Here's what I wore today.' And we're just going to try to thread that needle a little bit more.
Yep. 100%. But all of the news this week, I think, is demonstrably less important than weird stuff that Nilay and David have been doing on their computers this week.
Let's make the show about ourselves. As I was saying,
let's just do it. Let's start with you, Nilay, because you, I think, owe us updates on a couple of different projects. Starting with your iMac as monitor saga, which has been elevated to the level of a saga here on the Vergecast.
It is a little bit of a saga. It's not so much of a saga, but it's a little bit of one.
I believe where we left off was you were going to try some wacky firmware shenanigans.
So, I bought the Stonetaskin R1820, which is now a model number that I know and talk about as though everyone cares about iMac display retrofit boards.
There is a community and that community is great and they have been working on this for years. You can go read those threads. They were literally years long on various forums. So, I bought the newest board because you got to buy the newest one, not the one everyone's been using for years that obviously works, right? You have to buy the newest one.
The 1811 is the one that everyone's using for years that already works.
But I bought the 1820 because it's new. You understand what I'm saying?
So the 1820 came to my house, opened the iMac. It was harrowing in its way, but not as hard as people say. Put the board in. Kind of did a bad job. I called Snazzy Labs. They did a way better job. Go watch that video. It's way more impressive than whatever I did. Set it all up. It works. It lights up. It looks beautiful. Well, I have a little color calibrator so that you know when the display is in an iMac, Apple controls the color so it's like perfect in the way that Apple color is perfect. When it's just running native off some board you bought from China, it's just sort of a little green. So, I color calibrated it, made it look good, and then you install this software called BetterDisplay to control the brightness with the keyboard, which you obviously have to do.
I mean, how could you not? Mhm.
And the backlight mapping was inaccurate. And so as you stepped up the brightness, it would get to 100 and then reset like halfway through and then do it again.
So, one, this is not a problem because you can just set it to 100. You can set it to its obvious brightest setting and leave it alone.
Like, it has to be on principle.
So I find myself emailing with Stonetaskin. And just as a customer, they don't know who I am. They were very responsive. Feel great about that. They sent me a very blurry video of how to update the firmware using a piece of software that only runs on Windows and only addresses the card over DisplayPort.
Now, here's problem one. All of my Windows PCs don't have DisplayPort. Like, they're all ancient. The only one in our house that does is Becky's work computer, which she would not allow me to install Chinese firmware updaters on.
Two, I never anticipated using the DisplayPort on this thing and the board is now sealed inside the iMac whose screen has been glued back on.
Right? Because you get to the end of this process and you're like, I am never going to open this again.
HDMI port setup. It's plugged into the Mac Studio. By the time I buy a new computer, this adventure will have to come to some sort of conclusion, right? This display will be like 20 years old and I will have to buy a new one. I made it work in this setup and that's how long it's going to take. Now I need the DisplayPort. So the only way to... I'm not going to cut the display open again. So I have to dig around the memory access door with a DisplayPort cable and try to get it in the board. So that's one. And then two, I was like, I need a computer with a DisplayPort. And we looked in the reviews closet, I said last week, and we found a Surface laptop from like 2019 with a mini DisplayPort. And I took it out of the reviews closet. I put it on my desk in my office. And then I promptly left the office without it. So, now what am I going to do? I installed Windows 10 on Becky's old Intel MacBook Air, which has been sitting on a shelf for ages, with a USB-C to DisplayPort. Figured it all out. Downloaded the weird software. Watched a very blurry video that was... the software is in Chinese. There's a lot going on in this video. Nailed it. Nailed it out the gate in one. Terrifying. The MacBook Air has now been reset because it had a Chinese firmware updater installed in Windows on it. So, that is no longer doing whatever it may have been doing to my house. And then I booted it all up and it worked great. And the entire interface of this monitor is now in Chinese.
I mean, I hate to say you both deserve this and should have seen it coming. You know, it's excellent customer service. Just one last step that I needed to resolve. So, I ended up sitting there with Gemini taking pictures of the display, translating menus until I found the one. I mean, this is like if you look at the buttons, it's just a raw PCB that sticks out of the back of the iMac casing on a ribbon cable and it just has some unlabeled buttons on it. So, there's just a lot of mistakes to be made as you navigate sort of backwards on the front of the thing in Chinese with Gemini in your hand. Like, none of that was elegant, I would say.
But I feel like a monitor interface is like four buttons, right? It's like you can figure out which icon means contrast and which icon means brightness and then you just move it to the thing and it's fine.
Right there. I would say that they did not use icons. The universal language of graphics is not present in this interface. Contrast, you have the dark half and the light half. Brightness is the sun. Like, I was trying to change it to English, which is... like I think in the grand scheme of all language settings, the fact that the one that lets you change the language is always in the language you don't understand.
Like, that's how that goes. Anyhow, I figured it out. It's in English now. It works. The only thing is when you turn on the computer and it wakes from sleep, it lights up and then it turns off and it thinks real hard and then it comes back again and it's fine for the day.
It's this one little problem, it does a little handshaky weirdness, but like totally acceptable to have an excellent looking 5K display connected to my Mac Studio.
This is now a what is Nilay's threshold for solving this problem question because are you going to do that for 10 days and then be like, I could fix this and go through this again, or have we officially reached I'm never touching this thing ever again?
We're never touching it. It is buttoned back up. There's a DisplayPort extension coming out of it. As long as I was fishing, I put a USB-C extension in the back of there. We're done. We're super done.
How upset do you think Jony Ive would be if you showed him the inside of your iMac now?
I think the part where I grabbed the main logic board of an iMac and just yanked it out of Jony Ive's carefully constructed, exquisitely packaged internals because I was like, it doesn't matter if this breaks. And I just yanked it. I literally thought about Jony Ive in that moment. I was like, someone worked on this very hard because you know it's beautiful in the Apple way. You open it and it is beautiful inside. And I was like, huh, that sucks for you. And it just started pulling out stuff because what you need is an empty case to fit the board in. Anyway, it's done. We're going to leave it alone. The other hilarious thing about BetterDisplay that I should say, my other monitor, my Zoom monitor, my Google Meet video conferencing monitor is the sort of infamous Samsung Curve TV that I bought almost a decade ago now.
Because it's all you need. You just need a 40-inch screen over there to run some video conferencing software on. And there's like a webcam in front of it. BetterDisplay can talk to that screen over Wi-Fi, over the internet.
So when I turn on my computer now, because that's a TV and it doesn't respect sleep commands, so it's like, okay, I found that display, you know, I fixed its IP address on my router, and it just turns it on and off with the computer now over the network. I've never been happier with like a little thing, like an unnecessary little feature.
I used to have to turn on that thing with the remote every day and now it's like the computer is like, I see it, I'll just send the packet to it and it just does it. It's amazing. The software is like wild. It's not complete software. Like it's obviously made by people who care a lot about displays in very nerdy ways and assume you know everything that they know.
But when you figure it out, it works amazing.
That is pretty cool. I just realized, A, we need to do like a Nilay Patel studio tour thing. But B, my picture of your studio, I'm just realizing this right now, is that you essentially are in like the back room of a Best Buy with just a bunch of like weird old stuff.
That you've just sort of... It's like you're like an ongoing Geek Squad project that no one wants at the end.
It's not wrong. Except it, you know, it's like the attic next to my daughter's bedroom.
And it is just a mess in here. Like there's just stuff everywhere. I need to clean it up. That's why I was like, no one wants a studio tour. People think this is all very glamorous and exciting and I'm like, I'm staring over my laptop at just a giant pile of unfolded laundry. Like this is just what we're doing today.
All right. What's your project?
So I've been vibe coding like a maniac for months now. But I have finally built my dream productivity tool, which no one is going to care about. But I've had very funny adventures with it recently. So, Thomas Paul Mann, the CEO of Raycast, came on this show a while ago and told me his big theory of AI is that the best thing you can do with these generative tools is build software because you can do it once and when you get the thing to work, then it works every time. That like reinventing the wheel and having this thing go out and do explorations for the same thing over and over and over, the sort of agentic world we're talking about, is the wrong approach. But what you can do is you can build specific useful software that you can then test and verify and once you have that it can just be reliable software. So he was one of the first people who really turned me on to the idea of why AI software is actually a really powerful idea for a lot of reasons. So I have set out to build myself my ideal to-do list and notes and keep-all-my-life-together tool. I need to write a long story about my many adventures, but I basically tried to build a whole thing from scratch, got super far down the road, and then got annoyed by all the bugs I couldn't figure out how to fix and bailed. I then tried to do a less ambitious thing that I got bored with and bailed. And what I eventually found was I use a bunch of different services, all of which have built MCP servers. They've built really robust APIs and in many cases they built command line interfaces for working with AI. So, I was like, 'Oh, rather than try to reinvent Todoist, which I use for to-dos, which I think is like a really great infrastructure, but a really ugly app, I can just build my own thing to look at Todoist.' And so now I have a thing that pipes in my calendar events from Google, my to-dos from Todoist, my notes from a text file, which I sync with Obsidian, and then two other services. One, Readwise Reader, which I use for saving and reading articles, and raindrop.io, which I use for bookmarking. And all of this just pours into one little web app that I've built myself that looks exactly the way that I want it to and is just full of all the things that I make every day. And then at the end of every day, I export a markdown file with everything I did and created that day that now is like in a searchable archive of text files on my desktop. And it's awesome and I love it very much. But the funniest thing that has happened to me recently is I wanted to build this thing for mobile, right? It's a web app. I can use it as a progressive web app, but I was like, there's some little things I want to do. I want to build this as like a more robust desktop app on my computer. So, I start fussing with Electron. We go through this whole thing. It's like, okay, I'm just going to build this thing as a DMG on my Mac so that I can pin it on top of other apps essentially and like access it with global shortcuts and from the menu bar and stuff like this. You have to build slightly more on top of a tab in order to make that work. I told it to just do this and it's like, cool, I can do that for you. Goes off and does it. It pulled an entirely different Vercel web app and compiled it onto my desktop. The strangest thing I've ever experienced. It was like I've been doing this thing inside of Claude Code for like 3 weeks now, like building and refining this thing. And I was like, 'Okay, just make this thing a DMG.' And it goes, 'Great, I've compiled this for you. It'll run on your desktop.' So I run it and install it completely. I just got somebody else's private web app inside of my thing. And I literally responded to Claude Code. I was like, 'Uh, I don't know what this is, but this is a completely different app.' And it goes, 'Oh, sorry. Grabbed it from the wrong URL.'
So, you could just do it. Just went and got it for me. And this is a thing that has actually happened a few times where it guesses what your GitHub link is and pulls the wrong thing based on what it thinks its name should be. It has tried to upload things to the wrong place. It at one point made this whole thing public and then was like, 'Hey, your Google API credentials have just been public on GitHub for 5 minutes. Hope that's not a problem.' And so it's just like all of these... I know you've been using these tools a bunch too, but it has this relentless ability to just keep trying to do stuff and generally speaking, I've had to interrupt it a bunch of times and be like, 'Hey, you need this one very small piece of information. I can just give it to you. Like you don't have to go guess where it exists on the internet or try to figure it out or do a bunch of weird stuff to go find this API. Like I know the URL. I can just tell you what it is. It'll be fine.' And it's like, 'Oh, that'd be great.' Like, well, you've been working for an hour and we've burned down a rainforest so that you could do this. But at the end of all of this, I did it. I have vibe coded myself an app that I use all day, every day.
And it's just a regular piece of software that you made that runs on your desktop natively.
It's mostly still a web app because I wanted to be able to use it like A, everywhere and B, like in a browser and pull stuff to it.
Where is the web app hosted?
And I could tell you the URL, but then you'd presumably be able to just use it.
Yeah, I should. Can you give me access to... I feel like I can start assigning you to...
I would like you to add things to my to-do list. That would honestly be helpful for me. But yeah, and it's like I feel sort of the way I bet you feel about your iMac, which is that like I did it. There's this insane process. It took too long. Like, could I have successfully used the limited amount of HTML and CSS and JavaScript that I have to build this myself? Probably. But instead, like last night, I spent 3 hours playing video games. This is a real story. I'm sitting there playing FIFA and every time the ball would go out of bounds and there's like a throw-in or halftime or whatever, I would just lean over and do another command for Claude Code and it's just sitting there building this thing for me as I'm playing video games. And I'm like, this is a future I can get behind.
Yeah. I have two thoughts about this because I'm going to talk about my own little vibe coding adventure. One, I have the same general reaction to all of these stories that I do when people tell me about their dreams. I'm like, you had real emotions. You felt real feelings. I feel nothing because you were describing a literal hallucination that your mind created while you were asleep. Like I'm sorry. And like some people are really into other people's dreams and some people aren't. Like actually Addy Robertson wrote this headline about AI generated art for us like years ago because people would make it and they'd be so excited about it and as we can all tell, it kind of doesn't hit unless it's like a dancing baby strawberry and you're like, something is happening in America. That's how I feel about all of those.
I think that's fine. There's something about that that I think is really important and it connects to how all the software people we know are having full emotional crises about the nature of software development and they're landing on the thing is alive and the way OpenAI and Anthropic now talk about their coding tools specifically, they just call them AGI. We'll come to this, right? Like they've arrived at like it's obviously AGI is here because it can write software for you. But then the outputs are like I made myself a little piece of software. Like I'll just say mine, like I made myself a little piece of software this week. It is very stupid. It is so much stupider than yours. But I defeated the SmartThings API on the Frame TV and I'm very proud of myself.
Okay. You let the AI control your house now.
No, no, no, no. I'm much more of a scaredy-cat than you.
So, I have a MacBook Air that now has Canva on it because we got Max a Cricut printer for her birthday. And so like we're just going to use it for that. But also it's my agentic toy playground, you know. That's the right combination of things.
Let it design school projects and open Claude. What could possibly go wrong?
So just using cowork because cowork is a little bit better behaved. Also Anthropic changed its pricing for OpenClaw. So that's all a mess.
But so this week, and so I just like won't let it out of the box. And so I really want, you know, I have two shows. You know, I host Decoder and we do the Vergecast and I need to change the picture on this TV. And then also we've decided that gamer lights are appropriate for the Vergecast and not appropriate for interviewing CEOs. So like the lights need to change, like the lighting preset needs to change. I bought a Stream Deck, a Stream Deck Neo. It's little and cute and it, you know, it just has buttons on it. And I was like, when I push the button, the lights should change and the image on the TV should change. And the lights are easy because the lights run on a piece of Mac desktop software called Amaran Desktop which has a Stream Deck plugin. So you set up the scene, push the button, great, the lights all change.
As someone who has seen you fight with just changing the image on the Frame TV, this seems very exciting.
Right. So the Frame TV runs Tizen, which is controlled by SmartThings, which is software written by Samsung. And Samsung, I would say, has not taken advantage of the vibe coding revolution to make better software.
You know that it just is the thing that is. And SmartThings as a platform in particular is very bad because from what I can tell the TV runs like a little web server that the SmartThings app on your phone has to connect to anew every time as though it has never even considered this opportunity in its life. It's like, 'Oh my god, I can see your TV. Would you like to set it up?' Like every time it's like utterly confused about what's going on.
And nothing about that API lets you do the one thing that you might want to do on a Frame TV, which is change the artwork, right?
Or importantly, I know you've run into this, turn the TV on and off in a predictable way.
That is just not a choice you can make with a Frame.
That's because on and off is not a concept the Frame TV understands, right? There's on, there's kind of on, and then there's also off. But off is sometimes on, and on is technically also off.
Everything I just said is accurate.
Frame TV users, you want to turn on a Frame TV into art mode and then set an image. You would think this is like the most basic thing you would want to automate on this TV. It is possible to light up a Frame TV, pick one of Samsung's built-in free streaming apps, and like select a channel. It is not possible to turn it on in art mode and select an image. These things just like don't exist in the SmartThings API. So I asked Claude to do it. Claude, and you know, it's like I have a little kid. You've got a little kid. It's like watching them just fall off the bed. It's like, oh, don't do that. Oh, you did it. And it's like, I'm going to use the SmartThings API. And I just watched it try to use the SmartThings API. God, and it failed. And then it found a bunch of Reddit threads that I was also familiar with from the past where people have discovered the controls to do these things with websockets locally on the network. So if... and I have never set this up because you need like a Raspberry Pi running Python, like you need a little computer somewhere on your network that will just always talk to this thing. And I just haven't gotten all the way there. But when you have Claude, it's like, 'Oh, I wrote a Python script for your Mac that sits right in front of the TV.' And now the Stream Deck just runs that Python script and it... and it, you know, it took a long time. It had to talk to the TV. It had to figure out the file list of all the images on the TV and which images I wanted and all of this is stuff like you're saying. Before I had children, this would have been a somewhat frustrating yet ultimately rewarding weekend of screwing around in the terminal and like reading Reddit threads. And instead, it was a somewhat frustrating but ultimately rewarding half afternoon in between meetings of letting Claude just run at SmartThings and watching it happen. And I don't let Claude use my terminal. Like again, I'm much more of a scaredy-cat than you are. So, I was copying and pasting commands and code back and forth, which is slow, but like again this is my level of understanding. Like I could read the code and make sure... and these are not long commands, right? I can make sure it was doing what I thought it was supposed to do. Again, very, very basic. I'm not even remotely pretending that I'm good at this. I can just read three lines of Python and be like, 'Okay, you're sending a command to the TV to get its file list.' Like I know, I understand what I'm looking at here.
Like, is there a crypto miner on my Frame TV now? Like I don't know 100%, but I'm reasonably confident. Anyhow, so we made the scripts. They are sitting on this machine that I podcast from. And when I push the button on the Stream Deck, I'll do it right now. It turns the lights. It does a macro. It changes the lights to white. It sends the command and picks the image on the TV. And this is like a huge victory that because I have a baby, I would have never had a Saturday to be able to do. And like I just feel great about this. Did I just describe to you a dream? Like with all the emotional stakes of describing a dream? I think so. But I think you and I both look at this, you're like, 'Oh, a lot more people are going to be able to do a lot more things.' And that is worth taking seriously.
Now, I don't think any of this is like consumer software, which is the thing I keep saying. Like this is, we are both, you and I are like enthusiast hobbyists, like whatever category of tech nerd we are.
Like I could not... no normal person is ripping open their iMac and writing Python scripts to change the art on their Frame. Like it's just, we're still pretty far away from that. But there's a glimmer of something important here.
Yeah, I agree. And it is way too much work. Like even the idea that you have to open up the terminal and copy and paste a bunch of commands. Like just to... we're going to move on from this, but one tiny example is a thing I've been thinking about a lot is like when you get into the terminal, one thing you constantly have to do is tell the terminal which part of the computer to address, right? Its understanding of where you are looking and where it's supposed to work from doesn't exist. You have to give it all this context. Claude Code by default doesn't do that. So you're constantly, at least my experience has been, I'm constantly running the wrong terminal command and then it's like, 'Well, where is that? I can't find the folder you're looking for.' And then I have to go back to Claude and be like, 'What's the address of this folder again? Give me the full thing to ask.' And it's just like that, you've lost people, right? Like this is no longer a system that just works in any meaningful sense of the word. But the end result is very powerful, which is you have a problem that no one else has and I have a problem that no one else has and we have both successfully solved that problem and that's very powerful because I do think everybody has a problem that no one else has. So you can... I think you're exactly right, like there is a glimmer of something here, but it is like we're still nowhere near this being mainstream consumer technology yet.
And the gap that I would close there is most people cannot describe the problems they have in terms of software.
Your problem, described very abstractly in terms of software, is there's a bunch of databases that I would like to look at all at the same time.
Yes. Yeah. Very straightforward.
And like software is made for that.
Yeah. And like most software is 'look at this database.' Like we keep having calls on Decoder and I'm like, all right, call Zillow, you made a database and all of your money is in the app that looks at that database and now someone else might just show up and look at that database without your app in the way and we've just done like a hundred episodes that are basically that theme. And something about AI is going to upend all of that. But for consumers being like, so what in your life is a database? You just get the blank stare. There's no follow-up conversation. You're just sitting alone at your bar being like, 'But databases are important.'
Which to be clear is good and correct. People should not have to think about databases in their lives.
Your life is run by databases. That is true. What is the Frame TV but a database of artwork?
Is the database on or is it off? Nilay, think about that.
All right, let's turn now to the Hype Desk, our new segment about what is cool and rad in the world. Welcome back, Ross Miller and Ashley Eskeeta to tell us what is truly hype on the internet these days. Ross, Ashley, welcome back.
Yeah, didn't think we were going to get another invitation. I mean, it's a week-to-week thing. I would say, but for now, you barely made it by the skin of your teeth. Nilay, you gave a speech last time. Do you want to give a shorter version of the speech this time about what the Hype Desk is?
Yeah, the Hype Desk is where Ross and Ashley, who are our friends who do not work at The Verge, come and tell us what's hot in, I don't know, entertainment, video games, cool stuff out in the world. And then because they don't work at The Verge, if brands want to do brand integrations, you can buy them because you can't buy us. And this makes our ethics policy stay pure, which is very precious to us.
My favorite part of the Hype Desk last week is the YouTube audience completely understood what was going on and was very happy to see Ross and Ashley. And the audience that leaves comments on theverge.com was like, 'Why do you have to make money?'
I literally got an email last week that was like, 'Why are you guys doing stuff that seems like you're trying to make money?'
And I was like, 'Well, this is fascinating and we should talk about it.' But it is a thing we will do always is try to make very clear what is and is not sponsored. In the Hype Desk, what we want to do is we want this to be good even when no one's paying for it and we want it to also be good when someone is paying for it. Today is unsponsored for flavor.
Exactly. Fun. All fun, no profit this week. That's what we're doing. Ross and Ashley, what have you guys been up to? What do you have for us this week?
Oh man. I mean, well, we've been both obsessing over Artemis 2. That's like... but before we talk about that, Ross, I think we need to discuss the terrible tragedy that's befallen us named the Super Mario Galaxy movie.
Yeah, there are two through lines in both of these which I'm very proud of and it means this happened. We're going to be talking space.
Yes, we're going to be talking space and we're going to be talking plumbers in both of these segments.
In both stories. Weird overlap works out really good.
But first, we're going to talk about the Mario Galaxy movie. It had the opening weekend, 370 million. It didn't quite hit what the first one did, but like just barely. I mean, it's going to be a billion-dollar movie at a time when theaters just need that. Like, it's a very good thing for film. It's not a good film, but it's a great spectacle.
I thought the first one was good.
Yeah, I thought it was solid. I thought it was cute.
It was cute, but oh boy. The critics don't care for it. They are angry. The critics are actually furious about it. Somebody said it was physically painful to sit through.
Goodness. And so is it just people are going to see it because it's something to do? I don't... because the critic-populist gap is bigger than ever in all things lately.
This was also sort of true with the first Mario movie which was like critics were kind of like, meh. And audiences loved it. I loved it. So I was optimistic coming into this one. I have not seen it yet.
I think you will like it too. I enjoyed it but I enjoyed it going in with the right mindset. Like it is not trying to make like a narratively brilliant movie. It is designed the way you design a Nintendo game. There's a bunch of really cool scenes that are like very loosely connected, right? And it is just like breakneck pace. Like I remember I went to see it with a friend this week and I looked over a couple times going, 'How did we get to this point?' Because I had just forgotten how they jumped around. Like the thing that I cannot convey enough is I am struggling to think of a Mario game that has not been referenced between these two movies. It's like Nintendo Illumination thought they would get no other chance, so they threw every single idea they had.
Did they get to Luigi's Mansion?
In the first movie, there's like a reference to it, and that's as far as we've gotten. And if there is a third movie,
I want the spin-off. I want a whole Luigi's Mansion spin-off. I want a whole series.
It feels like they're going for the Smash Brothers cinematic universe. Like, they're just throwing every Nintendo idea.
They introduce a lot of characters in this one.
Yeah, it's not a spoiler. Star Fox is in this.
Star Fox is in the trailers, right?
Yeah. My son told me that there was a character in it. I'm just going to spoil it. I don't care. Somebody was like, he was like, 'Mama, guess...' my mother took him to go see it before we could see it together, which is a great offense to me as a Nintendo fan. But he said, 'Oh, mama, Rob is in this movie.' And I'm like, 'What?' First of all, huge high five to my six-year-old for remembering who Rob is. But yeah, he's like, 'Rob is in this movie.' And I was like, 'That feels like a lot.' Like that feels like they really jammed them all in there. Phanto is in this movie from Super Mario Brothers 2.
Can I put this on like a spectrum of things?
There's, I would say, the Lego Movie, the first Lego Movie or even the Lego Batman Movie. Really well done. Lots of references.
Very commercial. Like the toys are alive.
On the other end of the spectrum is, I don't know, Ready Player One, which is just a non-stop sequence of references hung together in a plot that I think ends with being like, 'You should not trust Mark Zuckerberg.' Like something happened there.
