PK: When I used to write more about the music business, the thing I would always end up doing was, I’d go meet some executive. At some point, they’d say, “Oh, you’ve got to hear this.” No matter how big their office was, they had giant freaking speakers, and they would blast it. And you have to sit there and nod politely. I kept thinking, “No one I know has these stereo setups,” at least not in New York City. No one listens to music like this. You should give me a pair of shitty AirPods and let me listen to it that way. So I agree with you, Mike. That’s how you should dogfood it.
LG: I don’t think we’ve spent a lot of time dunking on Quibi. Have we, Mike?
MC: I think we have been not talking about Quibi, which is equivalent to dunking on it, ignoring it.
LG: I mean, I’m not paying for it. Are you?
MC: No, it’s so expensive.
PK: I paid for it accidentally. I signed up for the trial and then was expecting to get a reminder saying, “Hey, Quibi is going to charge you in a minute” but didn’t get it. I just got a bill. Then I turned it off.
MC: Wait, you’re telling me that a subscription service did not build it into their UI to remind you to unsubscribe?
PK: I seem to remember Apple being much more proactive in telling you that, hey, you’ve got this thing coming up. You better unsubscribe if you don’t want to pay for it. And I may just be fantasizing, that never happened. But Apple is very much in the “We would like you to subscribe in to Quibi and lots of other services because we get a cut of it, business.” If you are someone like us who is sloppily signed up for a bunch of stuff over time, you should go back and check your subscriptions, because you might be paying for something you didn’t realize.
MC: Well, Peter, you actually did get a reminder from Quibi, but you were holding your phone in the wrong orientation so you didn’t see it.
PK: That’s a deep Quibi cut.
MC: All right. Well, let’s take a quick break. And then when we come back, we’ll do our recommendations.
[Break]
MC: All right. Welcome back. Peter, what is your recommendation?
PK: Can I do two? They’re super quick.
MC: Sure.
PK: OK. On TV, what we used to call TV, Amazon Prime has a show called ZeroZeroZero. It’s an eight-episode, beautiful, gorgeous, incredibly dark, incredibly pessimistic, incredibly nihilistic, guns, mafia, Mexican drug cartel story. Gabriel Byrne is in it and a bunch of actors you’ve never heard of, and it’s gorgeous. It has a soundtrack by a band, Mogwai. If you’re someone who likes to get high, that’s a great show to watch and listen to. It’s a real bummer, and it’s great. Then I can also highly endorse Vermont, where I spent the last week on vacation. It’s six hours from New York City and beautiful.
MC: Also a great place to go if you like to get high.
PK: Medical only is what I discovered when I was there.
MC: I went to college in Vermont, so hard endorse.
PK: I was all in.
MC: All right, Lauren, what is your recommendation?
LG: My recommendation is a film that I mentioned earlier in the show. It’s the new Andy Samberg movie on Hulu called Palm Springs, and our colleague Kate Knibbs wrote about this for WIRED last week so we will link to that review of the film in the show notes, but I found it to be just a delightful little two-hour slice of escapism. I’ll tell you quickly about the premise. The premise is basically Groundhog Day for the millennial generation who has to go to a lot of weddings or at least went to a lot of weddings in the before times.