Android Wear 2.0, Google Smart Home, and Vizio gets caught

This week on Vergecast, we’re in our new office! But our studios aren’t ready yet! So Nilay and Paul set up in a conference room and Skype with Dieter to share what they learned in the tech world over the past seven days. We even recorded it for you! Here it is. 01:54 - Android Wear 2.0 14:52 - Google Assistant on phone and smart home 27:02 - Apple's Ultra Accessory Connector dashes any hopes of a USB-C iPhone 32:08 - Fidget cube 33:56 - Most smart TVs are tracking you — Vizio just got caught 43:52 - Paul’s weekly segment “Please don’t talk to me, can’t you see I’m busy?” 47:13 - Neckbuds 51:30 - The Nintendo Switch is missing a golden tablet opportunity 57:16 - Lightning round Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  You were really mean last week, but that's what the people like. They like it when we tear each other down. Yeah. Then we build each other back up. Like Legos.

• 0:12Nilay Patel?

  Hello, and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com, which is kind of like an ephemeral media experience that just wraps around you wherever you are on the internet. That's what I'm saying now instead of website. An ephemeral media experience? Yeah, it finds you. I'm great at conferences.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  If The Verge is an ephemeral media experience, would that mean that the flagship is therefore a ghost ship?

• 0:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a ghost ship. Like in the new Johnny Depp Pirates movie? This is the worst, worst ad read for a Johnny Depp movie I've ever seen. What's it called? Pirates of the Caribbean? Yeah, it's Pirates of the Caribbean.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Dead men tell no tales.

• 0:52Nilay Patel?

  Is that what it's called? Anyway, this is The Vergecast. We're not actually sponsored by this Johnny Depp movie, although John, if you're listening, which I'm sure you are, give me a call. And we'll boot Squarespace right out of here. Anyway, this show is actually sponsored by a fake vodka brand that I, once again, am forcing LG G6 news onto the show so we can talk about it. The brand is called Scissor Vodka. You can just go ahead and cut right through that night. Snip, snip. There it is. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Dieter Bone is here. Hey, hey. Just the three of us today. Just a tight, very gadget-focused, gadget-forward. Is that what the influencers say? Gadget-forward? That's good. It's like a fine wine. Let's triangulate some news.

• 1:36Nilay Patel?

  It's actually kind of, I thought there wasn't much this week because another week of endless political machinations have occurred, making everything else seem trivial. But I went, we were looking, we were putting the rundown together. A lot of stuff happened this week. A lot of like tech news went down, so we should get right into it. Dieter, I want you to talk about Android Wear, because there's two new LG watches. They're sort of like, what's the new line that they're using? Made with our friends at Google? That's the new, it's kind of like Nexus descriptor. So LG is like, we've got this friend, Google, and we did exactly what they said, and then these are the watches they made. There's a sport and a style, and a new version of Android Wear. I think, Dieter, you've been wearing one.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been wearing the sport, which is huge. It is just a really giant, giant, giant watch. And then the style is a little bit too small. They didn't make the Goldilocks watch is what I'm saying to you now. So the, the whole point of Android Wear 2.0 is they basically did the same thing that Apple did last year, which was look at their smartwatch platform and go, huh? This is too much. This is really kind of complicated. And they like stripped out a bunch of stuff. And then they put in the stuff that everybody wanted them to put into it, which was third-party complications on the watch face. And they like fixed up Google Fit a little bit.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  And then because they're Google and they're beholden to pleasing wireless carriers, which is my new theme, by the way, Google totally over the barrel from wireless carriers. They made it fully support LTE, which

• 3:23Nilay Patel?

  Wait, why do you think that has anything to do with wireless carriers? Right. I mean, that's where all these devices are going, right? They're all going to have independent wireless connections.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Well, probably, but it's not a coinkydink that Verizon announced a rando white label watch called the Wear 24.

• 3:41Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  It's not, it's not a coinkydink that in order to get these watches to not be a huge pain, you have to spend the money on the wireless plan to have a second device that shares your phone number.

• 3:54Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  And that's, you know, that costs money, which, by the way, why does that cost money? It's not clear to me. It's not like you're, you know, using extra data. You're, you're straight up paying for like the, the fact that you've got another node on their network.

• 4:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  But I'm hard pressed to believe that really is worth 10 bucks a month to, you know,

• 4:16Nilay Patel?

  I don't believe that at all.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Verizon, AT&T. Anyway, the, the whole reason I'm like chasing this Google's beholden to carriers is it's, I think, also the reason that they won't just make an iMessage clone. And they're trying, they're still trying to get RCS to happen, which is sad. But this is about Android Wear.

• 4:38Nilay Patel?

  Android Wear is just a door by which we can talk about everything else that's interesting.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  It's fine. Like, it's a good upgrade. It's a good platform. Dan thought the apps were pretty slow. I thought they were fine. The improvements to Google Fit are actually surprisingly good. You get to watch a little video of a dude doing pushups on your watch and then you do the pushups yourself, which is kind of cool.

• 4:58Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  And it checks to see if you're doing them right. You can stream music on it just directly. You just open up Google Play Music. You don't have to fiddle with syncing the thing with your phone and getting your playlist on your watch and all that crap. You just play the music you want, which is pretty neat. It automatically grabs the best connection it can, whether it's LTE or Wi-Fi or Bluetooth from your phone or whatever. It just figures it out. And Android Pay is on there now. If you can get a watch with NFC, which only one has it, and it's the LG Watch Sport, and it's freaking huge.

• 5:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, you're wearing it right now.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  No, I'm wearing... I handed the Sport over to Lauren Good so that she could test the exercise stuff more carefully than I could, because I don't exercise. And I'm back on the Moto360. But I gotta tell you, I'm super torn, because what I'd want is an Android Wear watch that has NFC for Android Pay and maybe a heart rate monitor. I don't know. I don't exercise, but I'm gonna start someday, I swear, I promise. And you can't get that without getting the thing that has everything in it.

• 6:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  So I'm hoping that Google will actually get some other manufacturers to make some stuff, so that somebody will make something that's in the sweet spot, which is basically the feature set that the Apple Watch has. And by the way, the Apple Watch has everything that the Android Wear watch has in terms of sensors, except LTE, but it's not gargantuan.

• 6:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  So...

• 6:33Nilay Patel?

  So, Apple's just had its earnings. We talked about them a bit last week. The Apple Watches, they sold, I think analysts are guessing now, they sold 6 million of them. By revenue, they've become the second biggest watchmaker in the world. That product is doing fine. Sean Spicer wears one, which I think is funny because I just imagine him getting texts from the president while he's up there. They're like, do better. He just looks at his watch and it's just like, you're blowing it again. Please, please try. But like the Apple Watch is sort of everywhere, whereas I don't.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:04Nilay Patel?

  Outside of our staff and the occasional sort of like rage tweeter, I don't really see people wearing the Android Wear stuff.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  So the, the idea, which I don't think is going to be massively successful, but the idea is that the new Android Wear watches will work better for iPhone users because it has independent third-party apps on it. You can literally load up the Google Play Store on the watch itself.

• 7:29Nilay Patel?

  Nonsense.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  And install apps?

• 7:31Nilay Patel?

  Nonsense.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  But no, you can also just go to their website. You can go to the website. You can go to the Google Play website, which by the way, Apple doesn't have. Uh, and then you can say, install this thing and it installs directly to your watch. So you can do a lot more stuff with, if you're paired to an iPhone than you could have before with the last version of Android Wear. Um, so it's basically like a supercharged Pebble. That's probably going to have better app support than the Pebble did, but like the Pebble, it won't support iMessage.

• 8:00Nilay Patel?

  Right. I mean, Dan, so Dan reviewed the thing and he pointed out that we kind of know what these are for now. They're for the fitness stuff and they're for notifications and they're for these like lightweight apps. And I, so you think that Google's like bent over the carrier barrel and that's why they added LTE. I think they added LTE because they can't depend on the iPhone at all. So they want to sell any meaningful number of these things. Android users are like, they're not going to buy them. Like the, the stats on what iPhone users are willing to purchase for Android users. Totally skewed in favor of the iPhone owner, right?

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:35Nilay Patel?

  iPhone users buy more stuff for their phones. So they gotta capture some of that iPhone market. But they can't, they're never gonna get in on Apple's platform. So then their watch has to be completely independent. And the only way to do it really completely independently is to build an LTE radio into it. That costs you 10 bucks a month. I mean, Apple is just gonna win this war. Because the iPhone or the iPhone and the Apple Watch will always just pair better than anything else. And I, I don't think an Apple Watch LTE is where they're going with it, yet.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  I just think the LTE is just from the physics standpoint. It's just never, it's just never gonna work.

• 9:10Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah, this watch has wrist cancer in it.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  It's just, there's so much power and a certain size antenna that you need for LTE. And even with the like, the low energy LTE stuff that's coming out. I just don't.

• 9:24Nilay Patel?

  I was gonna say, that's, that could actually work. The low energy LTE stuff could actually do it, but it's not here yet. The, it is possible to make a watch that is not massive with LTE. The best tweet that I saw about the 100 wear stuff was, I forget who it was. They're like, man, the LG Watch Sport really makes me, you know, appreciate the Galaxy gear.

• 9:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  And yeah, and Samsung just often ties in universe.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  Can I, can I?

• 9:58Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Okay, I've never owned a smart watch.

• 10:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I have like eight Apple Watches.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  I did own a calculator watch at one point.

• 10:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  I can't believe they're called complications.

• 10:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, it's, it's the opposite word of what you want for user interface.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, like.

• 10:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I get it.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Little present.

• 10:15Nilay Patel?

  It's like watch lingo, but come on.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Oh, is that like a watch?

• 10:18Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Term?

• 10:19Nilay Patel?

  It's an old.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  I had a reader rage tweeting me saying, somebody went through your whole article and replaced all the times you wrote applications and replaced it with complications and you need to go fix it.

• 10:30Nilay Patel?

  I was like, I don't understand.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  But this does actually like make a lot of sense to me that that that watches something that you glance at. And if it has like, it's like a little dashboard that shows like relevant information from whatever possible app that I want to show information from. Like that it's like a mix and match thing, correct?

• 10:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, it's like a customization.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  I think that's pretty cool.

• 10:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I looked at my watch, I see the weather, I see my next appointment, I see the day of the week. Cause I am completely incapable of remembering what the day of the week is. See the date, I see the time. And then, you know, if I want to feel bad about myself, I put my step count on there.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Or yeah, your unread emails or or which we call it, what's that thing that we use for website traffic? Chartbeat.

• 11:18Nilay Patel?

  You want chartbeat on your watch?

• 11:19Speaker 02

  You put chartbeat on your watch.

• 11:21Nilay Patel?

  It'd be great if instead of monitoring your heart rate, it was like chartbeat, but it fed back into your heart. So if the site was doing really good, your heart was just racing.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Oh, like feedback heart rate.

• 11:32Nilay Patel?

  Just like tie your heart rate to some arbitrary web statistic.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  Well, and and one thing that I really like that they did with some of the wearable pioneers at like MIT and stuff. They were doing stuff with like effective computing, stuff that is like, and there's some, I think some recent, I actually believe it's MIT research on this. Like, I think they made it a watch that kind of shows you like the tone of voice in a conversation. And and this idea that you can have a complication that said like, hey, you're you're coming across a little mean right now.

• 12:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  You got like a grouchy tone. Oh, I didn't know I had a grouchy tone. Maybe it's like a little frowny face. Oh, shoot, I've got a grouchy tone, I've got a.

• 12:10Nilay Patel?

  Smile. It just tells you to smile.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Tells you to smile.

• 12:12Nilay Patel?

  That's what you want.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  Like, I think that those sorts of things, like that that you decide what is the priority. And so you don't even ever really interact with the watch on a regular basis. You just look at the watch and it tells you relevant facts for whatever your situation is in.

• 12:29Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that was the big promise of the first version of Android Wear, which is that Google Now Cards would start populating it automatically. So you'd show up at the airport and be like, it looks like you, I mean, basically wrist clippy. And I think we all know that wrist clippy conceptually doesn't work well.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  True.

• 12:48Nilay Patel?

  Wrist clippy works well, but they they never like. I mean, let's all face it. Google now did not come anywhere near achieving its promise and Google figured that out and then basically stopped doing it. Like, I tried to use it. I'll swipe over to it every now and then, but there's never, it's, I never have those like, oh, hey, this thing knows what I need to know before I ask for it moments anymore.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  It's a black box. It doesn't have a conversation with you to really figure it. I, it's not exactly Google now, but kind of that card functionality where Google reads your email and creates cards for you. I missed the flight. Yeah. Cause Google was like, you know what he really wants to know about? His connection in Chicago.

• 13:30Nilay Patel?

  No. You did not miss, you are not blaming missing a flight on Google Now. It's, Paul, I love you, but you can't blame missing a flight on Google Now.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  This is the whole literal, okay, slow down. This is the literal whole point of technology, right? Is to augment and supplement our own abilities.

• 13:49Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  Right?

• 13:50Nilay Patel?

  I agree. Yes.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Right?

• 13:51Nilay Patel?

  At the highest level, I agree with you.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  When do I go to my airplane place to Google and they tell you the wrong time?

• 14:02Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Google failed.

• 14:04Nilay Patel?

  No, you can't, you just, there's like a few things that you can't blame technology for and not knowing when you need to be on an airplane, I believe is in that list. Airplanes are important.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  I don't know. I did, I wanted to know. So I looked on my computer.

• 14:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  You don't call up the airplane people every time.

• 14:24Nilay Patel?

  Paul, wait, what I want to come, what I want to just bring all this way back to you. Why is your airline vocabulary so limited?

• 14:36Nilay Patel?

  You're like airplane stuff. I went on the fly, fly.

• 14:41Nilay Patel?

  What's going on over there, buddy?

• 14:44Speaker 02

  It's hard and I wanted the technology to help.

• 14:47Nilay Patel?

  I think I just need to get you like a general aviation dictionary. All right, speaking of conversational interfaces, uh, Google Assistant on the phone, super weird. Uh, now can control a bunch of smart home stuff, which is again weird because Google Assistant

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Ever fragmented in the first place.

• 15:08Nilay Patel?

  Home could already do it. And so it's weird that they're rolling out this capability in a fragmented way. But this is kind of the story of all these assistants right now. Dieter, did you decide if you're an Alexa guy or a Google Home guy?

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Uh, I'm still bouncing between them. I'm thinking about turning back into an Alexa guy because Amazon just updated the tap so that it'll actually use wake words. You don't have to tap the button anymore.

• 15:30Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  And I have a tap sitting around.

• 15:32Nilay Patel?

  One of the few Verge links I have ever IMed Becky, because we have a tap in our bathroom. I'll tell you that the, so she goes in there and listens to podcasts like all the time when she's getting ready in the morning. And it's, so she doesn't want to like push the button and ask where, because often it's it wrong. But the best feature of that thing is you push the button and say, connect to my phone. And then it automatically Bluetooth syncs to your phone, which is an unheralded feature of that device. Right. And the sound quality is bad and it looks bad and our UE boom is like a hundred times better in every other way. But the fact that you don't have to fuck with the Bluetooth settings, you can just be like, connect to my phone and it does it. Instantly makes it the winner. So now that you can add, you don't have to even push the button, you just walk in and say, connect to my phone and play a podcast. Amazing. Yeah.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 16:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm super excited about that. So I, we're all in on Alexa. I've packed up the Google Home.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 16:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 16:23Nilay Patel?

  It's like a thing.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Uh, I've been using the Google Home a little bit to play Netflix, which works.

• 16:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  The problem is, the problem is you do it and then you sort of never really know whether or not you're going to get like play, pause controls.

• 16:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the whole Chromecasting ecosystem, very bad at like maintaining.

• 16:44Nilay Patel?

  Estate. So if Dieter has a Vizio TV, I have a Chromecast plugged into a TV. I do all of my streaming over that Chromecast. It's great. Super love it. Do you have this problem? I hit play on like a show or an app or something. And then I close the tablet, move on, and I come back to change something. And the tablet has no idea what the fuck is going on in the TV.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  All the time.

• 17:05Nilay Patel?

  It's like, where do I stop this?

• 17:07Speaker 02

  Cause it's a magical cloud video now.

• 17:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but the whole point is that you're ca- I mean, I get it.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  That's the thing is you're not truly casting from.

• 17:16Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  You're asking your TV to start watching a file. That's why it's always kind of mysterious and confusing. Also, the two main things I want to use it with, NFL, never works.

• 17:28Nilay Patel?

  Oh, always works for me. That's actually why I switched to it almost entirely.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Twitch. Twitch will pop up the Twitch logo on my TV. Actually, the same with NFL. It'll pop up the logo like we're totally.

• 17:38Nilay Patel?

  Which what NFL app are you using or we're using?

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Okay, I can cast it from the app.

• 17:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  When I try to do it from the browser, from Chrome on my Mac.

• 17:46Nilay Patel?

  Oh.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  It's totally messed up. Same with Twitch and with NFL.

• 17:50Nilay Patel?

  But are you using like Sunday Ticket or using?

• 17:52Speaker 02

  No, sorry, the Game Pass.

• 17:54Nilay Patel?

  Oh, interesting. I don't know. I've never used that one. Sunday Ticket works great. That's why I switched all the things to Chromecast. Cause the Sunday Ticket app on the Apple TV, literally to make it go fullscreen. I think I've said this on the show before. To make it go fullscreen, do you know a button you hit? Pause. Just like, just such an embarrassingly bad UI decision that I switched platforms.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  I would just, yeah, but with Cast, it would be great if they, I don't quite know, cause it's not, it's not just like a technological thing. It's like a UX thing.

• 18:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  Of where should the play/pause controls be now that this is happening magically?

• 18:31Nilay Patel?

  The answer is like really obvious to me. It should be on, in your hand, on your phone. That's fine.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  So should there be like, I would be happy with, like, if I like lost my controls, that there was always like a Cast app that I could get.

• 18:43Nilay Patel?

  There is, but it's not, it just doesn't do the work.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 18:46Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, I mean, you're deeper into this, cause your whole, your whole TV works this way.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  I don't know. They just don't leave a permanent play/pause thing in any app anywhere.

• 18:54Nilay Patel?

  There's supposed to be one in the notification shade on Android, but that comes and goes.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Yep. Apparently some TVs, if you like hit the pause button that's connected to the TV, the Chromecast will figure it out.

• 19:03Nilay Patel?

  My Samsung doesn't.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  My remote doesn't have one. So, yeah.

• 19:07Nilay Patel?

  What, your Vizio doesn't have that? Doesn't it? It didn't come with a little remote?

• 19:10Speaker 01

  Doesn't have a pause button on the little remote.

• 19:12Nilay Patel?

  Hmm. Yeah.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  My little remote has a pause button.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  I'll have to look again. Anyway, we started with the Assistant. I still... It's still a little bit aggravating. Like, the Lifehacker actually did a chart of like what the Assistant can and can't do in like the four different instantiations that it currently exists. And it's just weird. And every time I yell at Google about it, they're like, "Yeah, you know, we'll get it. We just want to make sure that it's appropriate to the platform that you're on, so it doesn't make sense to..." I don't know. But like, it doesn't make sense to like turn on your smart lights by talking to Al. I'm like, "Yeah, you're probably right, but why not? Like, just do it."

• 19:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 19:48Nilay Patel?

  No, I mean, I think Google, right now, from a sheer execution standpoint, is not doing very well. I think they started off last year with a bunch of great ideas, and we were super high in them. And then, all of those ideas, an execution level, have not delivered. And I'm saying this as somebody who finally ordered a Pixel phone.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Really?

• 20:13Nilay Patel?

  For the six hours it was available again, and it will not be here until next month, late next month.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  It was on Verizon?

• 20:20Nilay Patel?

  No, I tried to order the unlocked one. I think Verizon stores get them in and out, but it's like, this was their thing.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  Verizon did like an apology headset thing.

• 20:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Gave some people daydreams because they were so, so sorry.

• 20:31Nilay Patel?

  But like, this was their push. They didn't get there. I think ALO and Duo is products are...

• 20:37Speaker 02

  Does anybody use ALO or Duo?

• 20:39Nilay Patel?

  Dieter?

• 20:40Speaker 01

  No.

• 20:40Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  No.

• 20:42Nilay Patel?

  The only person I know who would, doesn't use it.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  ALO just dropped out of the top 500 most popular apps on Google Play. That is rough.

• 20:50Nilay Patel?

  That's brutal. Um, the assistant that we're talking about, it just seems to be all over the place. The daydream VR stuff.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Well, it's not quite fair about the assistant. The assistant's good. They've been actually like low key adding a bunch of stuff to it. They just don't have, they just aren't doing everything like Alexa is. And it works. It's like, fine. I think that it's, it's a little bit frustrating that it's inconsistent across home, watch, phone, aloe, whatever. Uh, but that's like, I don't know. It's, it's like complaining that the gear shifter in my car is a little bit twitchy when the car still drives just fine.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Apple has some fragmentation with Siri. They just have less places.

• 21:36Nilay Patel?

  I don't think, I don't think Siri is even in this conversation, right? I mean, Siri's just like all over the place. I, I just meant holistically across all the big Google initiatives last year. It's hard to point to one that was a home run.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:50Nilay Patel?

  Because they executed it so well. It's, all of them are good ideas. They're interesting. I'm, I'm still very excited to get the Pixel. I'm just gonna get it halfway through its lifecycle because I was never able to order one for so long. And that's like irritating. I think with assistant, there's this, there's this Alexa moment. Uh, Jeff Bezos gave an interview to Billboard today. They put him on like their power list. And he's like, the momentum is actually taking us a little bit by surprise, but we're going with it. You know, we were built for this moment and they're just off to the races. And I think the Google argument, which is we have more data, we're actually, you know, a machine learning company. We're gonna win just because we're gonna win.

• 22:33Nilay Patel?

  Just, it reminds me of, of actually of like Microsoft 10 years ago. When they were like looking at the phone and they're like, well, screw that. Like, we sell all the things to everyone. All we have to do is show up and we'll win. And it's, it's the same.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Well,

• 22:47Nilay Patel?

  The tenor of that argument is the same to me.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  You could also almost see the flip side. I mean, a lot of the Alexa momentum. It feels, something that makes Alexa feel more inevitable to me is how many other devices are getting it.

• 23:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Uh, which is like, kinda like the Windows thing. And like, you know, I argued endlessly with my buddies down the street, you know, Mac versus PC in the nineties, you know? But no matter how polished and great I thought OS eight's UI was, um, you know, the, the, the power, the market power of Windows was so great because you can buy any computer at any price point and you could get your own thing.

• 23:30Nilay Patel?

  So, uh, Joanna Stern, our friend Joanna Stern, traderess Joanna Stern, she's just one of our founders, she's a journalist, so she did a great column video this week where she reviewed a bunch of stuff for her new car. Um, she rage texted me all through the process of buying that car. We should have her on here and talk about cars, it'd be fun. Um, but the car doc that she picked, she picked one of the Acker ones and she picked the Logi One Touch. We actually did a story on this this week too. That's like a magnetic car mount with a microphone in it. So when you take an Android phone and you click it in, it automatically pairs with your phone, launches the Logi app in the background and offers you another voice assistant, not Google Assistant, guess which one it offers you? Alexa.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Alexa.

• 24:14Nilay Patel?

  So, well, that is crazy to me, right? It's a, literally just a car mount. It's nothing. It's a couple of magnets and a microphone and it hijacks the Google Assistant away from your car and gives you Alexa instead, which is super interesting to me because now consumers have a choice and we can see which one they prefer. Um, I actually don't know why Google hasn't put an Android Auto app on the iPhone. I think it's a huge missed opportunity for them.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, they totally should.

• 24:39Nilay Patel?

  Like just, here's a Google Maps view and like some Spotify controls and like have at it. But it's interesting to me that Alexa is in a market position where a company like Logitech. Wouldn't just go to Google and say, "We built a car mount with a microphone."

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:54Nilay Patel?

  Can you connect this up to Google Assistant?" They went and picked Amazon. That's, I mean, it's just strange. Like, it's our, the code's already on the phone, the Google Assistant's already there. But what people want, or what Logitech thinks people want, is Alexa.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  So they went with Alexa. I think, I think the real answer is that Amazon's willing to play ball with anybody and everybody with Alexa, and they'll just, "Yeah, sure, make a thing. Here's the stuff. We'll help you out." "You want, you want all the IP for how to make a, a microphone array? It's all here. We'll help you build it."

• 25:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  And Google's like, "Yeah, no, we're gonna, we're gonna win everything." And so, you know, it's, it's, when you say that they're like Microsoft, like, that's exactly right. Amazon is out there saying, "Everybody make stuff. We don't care." And Google's like, "Yeah, no, we want to win. So everybody, hold on a second. We'll share later when we're ready."

• 25:39Nilay Patel?

  They want to make the car, too.

• 25:43Nilay Patel?

  So, I gotta read an ad, but we should come back. Uh, we should talk about the very minor Apple accessory nonsense that happened this week. And then we talked about Vizio for five seconds just now, but we should talk about the tracking controversy, because it's, it's pretty interesting to me, actually. But anyway, we'll be right back.

• 26:02Nilay Patel?

  Today's episode of The Virtuous Cast is brought to you by Crizal No Glare Lenses. Again, people at Crizal, thank you for continuing to sponsor this podcast. I don't know if you're listening or not, but it's, it's been, it's been a ride. If your glasses in you are fingerprint, smudges, scratches, and glares, it can be a constant obstruction to your vision and a huge distraction. Sometimes you end up focusing more on what's on your glasses than what's going on around you. That's why the people love Crizal No Glare Lenses. They give you the clearest vision possible by offering resistance to glare, scratches, and smudges. That means no more blinding glares from the headlights of oncoming traffic while driving at night. No more fingerprint smudges from taking your glasses on and off, or scratches from cleaning your lenses on your shirt. And because Crizal No Glare Lenses stay clear and reduce distracting glare, your friends and families can actually see your eyes, not just your glasses. And then they know if you're telling the fucking truth.

• 26:44Nilay Patel?

  Look better, feel better, and most importantly, be prepared for whatever comes your way with clear vision. Go to Crizal.com, that's C-R-I-Z-A-L dot com, and start living life in the clear.

• 26:55Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, do you want to walk us through this nonsense ultra-accessory connector situation?

• 26:58Speaker 01

  We can do this so fast. So it came out that Apple had for the made-for-iPhoam program, MFI, said, "We're going to support this ultra-accessory connector." And everyone went, "Oh, my God, Apple's making another connector." No, they're not. There's already a connector called the UAC, or whatever it's called, that looks like a little baby version of mini USB, basically.

• 27:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  And apparently, the story is headphone manufacturers want to be able to make headphones that can have cables that will work with either Lightning or can work with USB-C for Android phones that don't have headphone jacks. And in order to do that, you either have to build a really expensive cable that's got electronics in the cable that will, like, you know, talk to both of them, or you use, you put the electronics in the headphone and use a connector there. And apparently, a bunch of headphone manufacturers wanted to use that UAC connector instead of, I don't know, whatever. And they couldn't use USB-C because USB-C won't talk to Lightning without extra electronics,

• 28:06Speaker 01

  et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, bottom line, this plug might show up on some headphones so that they can ship in the box a dumb Lightning cable and a dumb USB-C cable so that you could use them with either iPhone or Android.

• 28:20Nilay Patel?

  So here's my question. It's a real question. By the way, if you're looking on Amazon for one of these cables, they're called a mini 8-pin flat. Okay. I have a lot to say about this, but here's my question. Simple question. What is Beats gonna do? Apple owns Beats. Presumably, they sell some Beats to people who don't have iPhones. It's one of the world's biggest headphone companies, one of the world's most profitable headphone companies. Are they gonna lock everybody out who doesn't have iPhone? Are they gonna make USB-C-specific Beats? Are they gonna have weird Lightning to... It's very confusing because some Beats headphones charge over lightning, like the Beats Pill.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  The new ones.

• 28:57Nilay Patel?

  Charges over lightning. Uh, a bunch of Beats headphones have mini USB or micro USB.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Micro.

• 29:03Nilay Patel?

  Micro USB. Are they gonna shove the new UAC and introduce a third connector into this mix? It's just like, what are we doing?

• 29:12Speaker 02

  I just wish Apple would just stick headphone jack.

• 29:16Nilay Patel?

  Or, yeah, the answer is, uh, it would be great if Apple would use USB C. Vlad is convinced that this news means it's never gonna happen. I, I, it just, I mean, look, you're gonna make fun of me, everyone's gonna make fun of me for the rest of my career because I think the headphone jack thing is so dumb. But this is what happens when you get rid of the universal standard.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  You guys want a, a dongle life update from the trenches?

• 29:35Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  I've lost my headphones that also had the dongle on them.

• 29:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  Right? The only pairs of headphones I can find in my apartment are these like two pound stereo monitor type things. And, um, and the AirPods with the Lightning connector that came with the. So now like every time I wanna watch a video on my laptop, I can't. Because I, I can't plug them into my laptop.

• 30:06Nilay Patel?

  Wait, I don't, what about your studio monitor things?

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Hmm?

• 30:09Nilay Patel?

  You're just, don't you, don't you have the cans? They don't, they don't have a regular jack?

• 30:13Speaker 02

  Oh, they're somewhere in my, uh, like apartment. But I mean, like if I'm at the coffee shop or at the office and I've got my Lightning headphones.

• 30:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you're screwed.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  I'm screwed. So.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Well, my, uh, my USB C is, my USB C life is wonderful update is I bought and just now received finally a, uh, Fin6 DART power adapter.

• 30:32Nilay Patel?

  Hey.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Which, like, what is this, what is the size of this thing? It's like half a Snickers bar, basically.

• 30:38Nilay Patel?

  Dieter's holding up to the can. If you're in your car, imagine.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  You can't see it.

• 30:41Nilay Patel?

  Dieter held up a power plug with a look of absolute joy on his face.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, it's like the size of like half a Snickers and it plugs in at the long end of the Snickers so that it doesn't get in the way of other power adapters. It's got a long USB C cable that comes out of it and the USB C cable has a regular female USB port on it so you can charge something else with it. It's 65 watts, so it'll charge my laptop and my phone both relatively quickly and it weighs nothing and it doesn't take up much space on a, on a power strip.

• 31:10Nilay Patel?

  I gotta get one of those.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 31:11Nilay Patel?

  These are great. Yeah. You should, uh, you know, put it on our ephemeral media brand.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  Well, here's the thing about about this thing. I didn't actually believe it was really gonna ship.

• 31:20Nilay Patel?

  Where's my lightning review? Your what? I just made up a format.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  A lightning?

• 31:25Nilay Patel?

  I need like two pictures and like 400 words.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  Okay, well, there you go.

• 31:28Nilay Patel?

  It's not a review of lightning.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  You didn't think? What's more ephemeral than than doing it on a podcast? You didn't think it was gonna ship?

• 31:35Nilay Patel?

  Doing it on Snapchat, obviously.

• 31:38Nilay Patel?

  Well, you didn't, because it was a Kickstarter, right?

• 31:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, no, it was, they make another one that comes like a slew of adapters and then they said, we're making a USB-C version. The stupid thing about it is that the plug on the actual adapter isn't USB-C, it's something proprietary.

• 31:53Nilay Patel?

  No!

• 31:53Speaker 02

  And I told them that.

• 31:56Nilay Patel?

  Come on!

• 31:58Speaker 02

  Dude, speaking, speaking of Kickstarter.

• 32:00Nilay Patel?

  It's like we're right up to the line of the dream and everyone's like, what if this dream was a fucking nightmare?

• 32:07Nilay Patel?

  What were you gonna say?

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Speaking of Kickstarter, I like, I'm like, hey, what am I gonna do right now? I'll load up theverge.com, a website I love to read. Dieter Bone has the friggin' Fidget Cube from Kickstarter.

• 32:21Nilay Patel?

  I have two of them, motherfucker.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  I backed that.

• 32:24Nilay Patel?

  Uh oh.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  And I was like, well, where's my Fidget Cube? So I go to my email that I never checked.

• 32:30Speaker 02

  And there's an email from, from the Fidget Cube people, says, uh, it'll ship between like the middle of January and the middle of February. And but there's a tracking number, click on the tracking number, it's arrived. But I don't have it, so I don't know, I guess it got lost in the mail.

• 32:49Nilay Patel?

  The story just really ended.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  Stuck on the fly fly.

• 32:55Nilay Patel?

  Stolen by those damn fly fly people.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  I theoretically own a shipped Fidget Cube, but I do not possess one.

• 33:03Nilay Patel?

  I understand. Ownership without possession.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:06Nilay Patel?

  That's a real airport psychology book. You know, like how to live a better life.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, ownership without possession.

• 33:11Nilay Patel?

  By Paul Miller.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  The conspiracy theory, so they like every Kickstarter, they had, they made a batch and then the first batch was bad. And they're like, well, we have to redo this and it delayed the actual release of the thing. Story of Kickstarter, but there's a million knockoff fidget cubes on Amazon. And everybody's pretty sure that what's happened is the factory that made the first bad batch said, ah, screw it. And then they like sold the bad batch. And so if you go to Amazon to buy the knockoff, you're getting the original version that they produced that they decided not to sell so that they can make it better.

• 33:45Nilay Patel?

  Interesting.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  That's the conspiracy theory, anyway.

• 33:47Nilay Patel?

  I mean, everyone loves a conspiracy theory. Speaking of which, we haven't talked about anything that's actually on the rundown for this, the second segment of the Vergecast. But let's talk about Vizio for a second. So this is actually, to me, some of the biggest news of the week. Vizio got caught, basically, not on their most recent TV. So not the SmartCast stuff that I was pretty excited about. Dieter, again, has a P-series SmartCast TV. So the ones that run Chromecast, they're not involved in this, but all the TVs previous, they had a bunch of user tracking turned on by default. And I, this is, I think, a dirty secret of the TV industry. They're all doing it.

• 34:29Nilay Patel?

  They all basically have automatic content recognition or ACR at the display and audio driver level. So they are listening to what's going through the speakers and watching what's on the screen. And see, basically, they see what you watch. They can, they can detect it. It's not like complicated technology. It's Shazam.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. Shouldn't HTTP block that?

• 34:52Nilay Patel?

  No, I mean, it's built into the panel.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  They're literally listening to the sound that comes out and they're like watching like a corner of the pixels. And you're just like, you need to watch just a second or two.

• 35:02Nilay Patel?

  So it's not a passive. It's happening in the panel driver.

• 35:05Speaker 02

  After it's decoded.

• 35:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so it's all happening at that level. So the, so Vizio had a service. Vizio is selling itself to Letco now. God only knows if that deal is going to close because Letco is like a garbage fire. But when Vizio was going to do an IPO and become a public company, their S1 filing revealed the depths of their tracking. It was actually going to become a separate part of their business. So they were going to have a TV business and then a data business. The data business was called Inscape. They were like, we sell the most TVs in the United States. We know what everyone is doing. We know what games they're playing. We know what they're watching on Netflix. We're the only company that has Netflix ratings information because Netflix doesn't release it.

• 35:50Nilay Patel?

  It was, it was huge. It was like a big piece of their.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  The tagline was gonna be, you can't escape.

• 35:56Nilay Patel?

  You can't escape. So they got hit with a bunch of class action lawsuits. They got hit with an FTC action. They, basically what they did was they, they kinda hid it. So when you set up your TV, you hit agree a bunch of times. You didn't read anything. So you just said, okay, and they opted you in. So the, it was, the setting was hidden and it was opt-in. So what you would have to do is turn something off. Other TVs, they bury it, but it's opt-out. I might have this backwards. Vizio's was opt-out. So the setting was buried and turned on by default. So you didn't even know that you were accepting something because it was just on. Other TVs make you opt-in, but they hide it in a bunch of junk. So you agree to something that you don't know you're agreeing to.

• 36:39Nilay Patel?

  So the same effect to the consumer, but because in particular Vizio had an opt-out system and they were by default tracking, they got dinged by the FTC. So now, a bunch of Vizio TVs, older Vizio TVs are getting pop-ups saying, turn it off. There's a whole page on Vizio.com, the tracking. There's a huge outcry. I saw people being like, throw away your Vizio TV. Like, fuck this company. It's just a fine response. Throw, just throw your stuff away. That's what you want to do. Or turn it off. And then the new TVs don't do it. But Jake Kastenak is.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  While you're, while you're there, turning off the, the setting for tracking, make sure that motion smoothing is off.

• 37:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just do it.

• 37:18Speaker 02

  Please.

• 37:19Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I watched the Super Bowl. It's at a friend's house and he had motion smoothing on his TV and like, he's like a pretty good friend, but he's not that kind of friend. And like, I was like, basically like sitting on my hands. I was like, I want to ruin your Super Bowl party.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  I have made the social faux pas. Showing up at somebody's house complaining about motion smoothing. And there was a little bit of like a bad, bad mood in the air.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  There's like, there's levels of friendship. The bottom level where like, you're, you're not friends. Is like, you're a friend, but you can't like have the motion smoothing conversation.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  So you just leave.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  And then, that's the, that's the first level.

• 37:53Nilay Patel?

  You're out. And then there's the one, and then my buddy Alex was like, I don't, something about this frame around this TV is wrong. I was like, yes!

• 38:01Nilay Patel?

  Someone said it, the door is open. The portal is revealed. And then, and then his actual TV remote, the batteries are dead because they were watching his cable box, I couldn't fix it. And we just all had to sit there and take it. And I literally thought to myself, I wish my phone had an IR blaster in it because I would just fix it right now.

• 38:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was, it was deep. Joanna's dad, Becky and I went and visited Joanna's family like two years ago, three years ago, and I turned off motion smoothing on her TV. And to this day, whenever Joanna sees her dad, he complains about me.

• 38:35Nilay Patel?

  He's like, that Neil, I screwed up my TV.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  Does everybody who lives with motion smoothing and prefers it, do they all love like the high frame rate hobbit?

• 38:46Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 38:49Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, back to the tracking. Jake Kasternakis wrote a great piece for us explaining how basically every service does this. If you have an Apple TV, you have to go and turn on limit ad tracking because otherwise it's like collecting data about what you're watching in the service. Roku's do it, you have to go turn it off. Samsung TVs do it and they do it hardcore. So if you're, when I'm watching football over my Chromecast on my Samsung TV, it literally detects that I'm watching football, shows me related scores and like news and highlights. It can set up and all at the display driver level of the TV. It's like crazy to me, but they don't have access to the, it's weird because your cable box does it too. You just think, you don't think of your cable box as like generating ratings information.

• 39:34Nilay Patel?

  And then the other thing was Vizio wasn't properly aggregating the data. So TiVo used to get in a lot of trouble because they collect data and they send it out, but their whole thing was, well, we aggregate it. So we don't say it's you.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Oh, it's not identifiable.

• 39:49Nilay Patel?

  All of the markets in California or Los Angeles or something, they watch this the most. And that was fine. Everyone's like a little squeamish about it. Vizio is like, this user, we won't identify them, but this user watched this stuff and you can target ads to them. Creepy.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  Well, I think I've brought this up before, but what is anybody working on like a completely dumb TV?

• 40:11Nilay Patel?

  Like, I mean, they're out there, but the biggest, highest end, most beautiful TVs are all smart TVs.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, someone who wants to put like just the step below highest end specs in a TV, but just make it a literal HDMI passthrough. You plug HDMI in and then stuff comes out.

• 40:29Nilay Patel?

  But if you're a company like VIZI or Samsung and you're making this other revenue stream, that's why you can make the TV so cheap. Like, it's a whole thing. But if you, if Samsung would sell me last year's high-end specs in a dumb TV, I would buy that instead of this year's high-end specs.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  I feel like the real thing to do-

• 40:45Nilay Patel?

  Or you could just not put your TV on the internet.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  The real thing to do is, is infiltrate the corporate speaking gig market with anarchists who can convince suits to not think that being a data company is the most lucrative thing to become in the 21st century.

• 41:05Nilay Patel?

  You can't, you can't do that. I mean, A, I think it's very easy to infiltrate the corporate speaking market.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:11Nilay Patel?

  For, for like, for us.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  Right. And then lie and tell them that data is not worth anything.

• 41:17Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, I would say like being the big contrarian at the conference.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 41:21Nilay Patel?

  That's a winning move.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:24Nilay Patel?

  Right? You want to show up there, you want to do your Malcolm Gladwell, like, you thought this.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:29Nilay Patel?

  The truth is different. Actually, that's another great, like, airport book, The Truth Is Different.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  The Truth Is Different. Fly, fly, word. I have like, I have like a naive belief and a hope that like, you know, the companies that do something like, I, I, I keep on thinking of Anchor for some reason. Just like, super straightforward, like, don't hide the specs, don't hide the information, just like, be just a straightforward, nice company that does things cheap.

• 41:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  There's some sort of reward for that.

• 42:02Nilay Patel?

  Power bricks.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  I know, but they do a good job with the power bricks.

• 42:05Nilay Patel?

  No, it's excellent. It's great, but like, they don't, they sell you stuff. Other people like sell you these things for free.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  Experience for millennials.

• 42:13Nilay Patel?

  It's a power brick experience for millennials. It tells you you're doing a good job when you plug it in.

• 42:21Nilay Patel?

  Do you want to talk about HelloFresh? I'm ready to talk about HelloFresh. They want to change the way people eat forever. HelloFresh believes everyone deserves honest, natural, delicious, healthy food. They celebrate fresh ingredients and making magic in the kitchen. They know there's a chef in everyone. That's you, Paul. You're a magic chef, which is actually a different kitchen brand. But we're talking about HelloFresh. They think food brings people together. Good food allows us to live longer and good food lets us enjoy every bite of life. Look, you're learning and growing every day. You never give up and you strive to make people happy. That's why HelloFresh started the movement. So whether you're a busy professional couple, a large family that runs at breakneck pace, or someone who simply wants to start cooking more, HelloFresh makes it easier, tastier, and healthier than ever to enjoy the experience of cooking

• 43:05Nilay Patel?

  new recipes and eating together at home. From creating the recipes and planning meals to grocery shopping and even delivering all the pre-measured ingredients, HelloFresh delivers right to your door so you can skip the trip. HelloFresh currently offers customers a classic box or veggie box and will be launching a family box soon so customers can order three, four, or five different meals per week designed for other two or four people. New recipes created every week. HelloFresh sources the freshest ingredients, measured to the exact quantities needed so there's no food waste. They employ a full-time registered dietitian staff who reviews each recipe to ensure it is nutritionally balanced. Everything's delivered to your doorstep in a special insulated box for free. So for $35 off your first week of deliveries, visit hellofresh.com and enter the code VERGE35 when you subscribe.

• 43:47Nilay Patel?

  That's hellofresh.com and the code is VERGE35. Paul, you do a segment every week.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  Every week.

• 43:54Nilay Patel?

  Every week. It's always got the same name.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  And I've never missed it a single time.

• 43:58Nilay Patel?

  No one's ever blown it.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  It's called Please Don't Talk To Me, Can't You See I'm Busy? So this is a Kickstarter called Luxa4. And it's a light that you plug in over USB to your computer. And it's like a status message from like AIM to let people in your office know whether or not they can talk to you.

• 44:25Nilay Patel?

  I can do other stuff, too. Or is it just a light? Like, if it's just a lamp that says, "Go away."

• 44:30Speaker 02

  It's a light, it's like a LED that changes different colors.

• 44:34Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  Uh, it could like, it could like notify you that you got an email or something like that. But there's plenty of ways to do that.

• 44:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  This is, this is being pitched as a way to tell your coworkers that you're busy and you don't want to talk to them.

• 44:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Status light and productivity tool.

• 44:50Nilay Patel?

  I feel like you could get-

• 44:52Speaker 02

  Reduces interruptions.

• 44:53Nilay Patel?

  You could just get one of those old on-air lights.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 44:57Nilay Patel?

  Like on eBay, you could just like get an old one, but instead of saying "on-air," you just change it so it says "no." And you just put that on your desk.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  Have you ever worked with a, with programmers who talk about flow?

• 45:06Nilay Patel?

  What's that?

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Flow is this state that a programmer, I'm sure other people do it too, get into, and it takes about like fifteen to thirty minutes to get into flow.

• 45:17Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  And if you break flow, you gotta start all over again trying to get back into flow. So that's why a lot of people talk about like the evils of Slack or something like that, because you can't get into flow because you're getting-

• 45:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  So you quit all your email apps, all your chat apps-

• 45:30Nilay Patel?

  This also just sounds like doing drugs.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  Plug in your Luxa4-

• 45:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  And get into flow.

• 45:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Wait, "a-flow" or "get into-flow"?

• 45:36Speaker 01

  It's called flow, not like "a-flow," but it's like you're, you're in the flow.

• 45:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  You're, you're, you're coding and like the, the code is magically coming out of you and you don't have to think about it. You don't have to consciously understand what the brackets do and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You're not arguing about how many spaces a tab is, where the semicolon goes.

• 45:55Nilay Patel?

  You're flowing.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  You're just doing it.

• 45:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  You're in the flow.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  And then Neelai Patel walks up, "Hey, what you doing over there?"

• 46:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And Paul's like, "I'm gadget blogging. I don't code here at all."

• 46:06Nilay Patel?

  "I'm using English like a human."

• 46:09Speaker 01

  You know what I want? You know what I want?

• 46:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  I want a thing where when my Bluetooth headphones get turned on on my computer, it automatically sets, uh, my notifications in Slack to snooze or like, "Leave me alone."

• 46:21Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good. That's what I want. We want Tasker for computers. Do they make a Tasker for computers?

• 46:26Speaker 02

  Going in.

• 46:27Nilay Patel?

  That's a thing. It's called Automator.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  It's called the Unix.

• 46:30Nilay Patel?

  Automator. And Apple doesn't care about it anymore.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  I made, I made my first successful Automator thing the other day.

• 46:36Nilay Patel?

  What's that?

• 46:37Speaker 02

  Really proud of myself. So I like to write in Markdown, but then our, like, Google Docs, you can copy and paste RTF, like rich text files, but also our, our, um, let's not call it CMS.

• 46:48Nilay Patel?

  Chorus. Our modern media stack.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  Our modern media stack also uses RTFs.

• 46:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  So I can write in Markdown and then I select that, right-click it, and then use my Automator action, which converts Markdown to RTF and then puts in my copy and paste board.

• 47:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:06Speaker 02

  My clipboard.

• 47:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:07Speaker 02

  And I paste it into Chorus.

• 47:08Nilay Patel?

  My FlyFly.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  Into my FlyFly.

• 47:11Nilay Patel?

  Nice.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  But yeah, this, this is.

• 47:13Nilay Patel?

  Can I confess something to you?

• 47:14Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 47:15Nilay Patel?

  I've been thinking about this for a long time. I think I might be ready for neck buds.

• 47:19Speaker 02

  Neck buds?

• 47:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, neck buds. Yeah, I'm in the same boat, actually.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  That's what I'm saying.

• 47:24Nilay Patel?

  Like, the Beats X are coming out in February. You, you just said Bluetooth headphones. Like, I kinda see the appeal, you know? I get it. I have a pair, I have the same headphones for planes that Dieter has. Uh, you might know them as FlyFlies. But I have QuietComfort 35s for the plane. I got them for Christmas. I was like, this is nice, Bluetooth, it's great. I don't want to wear those while I'm walking around the city because I'm afraid I won't hear anything and thus be killed. Because being in total isolation and when you're walking around the city is not a great idea. But I, AirPods, I, you know, have a pair of View AirPods. I don't think they fit my ears well. Other people love them. They just don't fit me well. So I'm like, what Bluetooth headphones should I get? And I'm like, I should get these Beats X, but they're fucking neck buds. Neck buds, man.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  I lived the neck bud life when it was like a horseshoe collar that you'd wear on your neck.

• 48:13Nilay Patel?

  That's still what they are. The Beats X are those.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  The Beats X are, are a wire.

• 48:17Nilay Patel?

  No, they're, they're more flexible. Yeah, but it's still, it still goes around. They're still a thing.

• 48:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it doesn't rest on your collarbone.

• 48:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  I mean, if, if AirPods do one thing for the world, and that's like, get rid of, you're wearing a Bluetooth headset, therefore you look like an idiot. And that gives me permission to wear neck buds, I think I might actually be happy with that future. Cause it's like, super convenient, just have them there and you stick them in your ear and they just drop again.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  If I'm wearing my AirPods, now my only functional pair of headphones. Like, if I take them out of my ears, like, I don't want to jam them into my pocket, so I unplug them from my phone and I hang them around my neck.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Oh, so Paul, this is, this is the, the move. I used to commute via bicycle. You need to run the wire for your headphones through your shirt. And then you take them off and they just like dangle from the collar of your shirt.

• 49:17Nilay Patel?

  I definitely watched, again, I've been watching just incredibly stupid movies every night, in an effort to engage in like, a real time activity, that is not painful.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  By the way, I just want to point out, my escape from political reality was playing Last of Us.

• 49:35Nilay Patel?

  Right. Not, it's like the wrong direction.

• 49:38Speaker 02

  No, no, it was fine. It like, okay.

• 49:41Nilay Patel?

  So we ran this story, you, you, I'm sure you saw the story, about how like, Trump time is a real thing. So every day feels super long, because you're constantly in like, a minor state of panic over what could happen. I'm sure you don't feel this way.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  I did not read this.

• 49:54Nilay Patel?

  Us bleeding heart liberals, total state of permanent panic.

• 49:58Speaker 02

  To be honest, I feel insensitive that I did not remember why you were in psychological pain.

• 50:03Nilay Patel?

  That's great, Paul. Whatever. You don't know what the word for plane is.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  It's the airplane place.

• 50:14Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, again, I've been watching really stupid movies. So I watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and there's that scene where, what's his name? Rupert Brant? Robert Brant? Robert Plant? Jimmy Page is in the airport.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Russell.

• 50:29Nilay Patel?

  Russell Brand.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Russell.

• 50:30Nilay Patel?

  Rupert Plant.

• 50:33Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, but I see, and he's got the headphones on. This movie, by the way, if you watch it, the technology in this movie, it's not that old of a movie.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:40Nilay Patel?

  Ancient technology all over the place.

• 50:43Speaker 02

  No.

• 50:44Nilay Patel?

  They're FaceTiming, it's not even called FaceTime, they're using iChat video.

• 50:47Speaker 02

  iChat.

• 50:48Nilay Patel?

  And they're changing all the backgrounds and it's like the hottest shit in the movie. Uh, he's got iPods, he like shows him a CD, it's like crazy. Anyway. Um, and he's got his headphones hanging out of the front of his shirt, the way that Dieter's describing.

• 50:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:59Nilay Patel?

  And I thought to myself, I used to try to do that all the time and it never works. Right? It, cause it, you've got it connected to your iPod, your iPod's in your pocket, your headphones are hanging down, you move your iPod, everything like goes crazy. But with neck pods, you could live, you could live that life.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. Live the dream.

• 51:17Nilay Patel?

  They should let me do the Beatsex marketing campaign and it's just me remaking that scene from forgetting Sarah Marshall, be like, you could look this cool.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  I'll try to find this image.

• 51:26Nilay Patel?

  Of what?

• 51:28Speaker 02

  Of Russell Brand.

• 51:29Nilay Patel?

  Are you Googling Jimmy Page Airport?

• 51:30Speaker 02

  Rupert.

• 51:30Nilay Patel?

  All right, Dieter, I want you to yell about the Nintendo Switch and then I think we should bring this to an end.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  The internet is pretty mad at me.

• 51:37Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 51:38Speaker 01

  I said, I had an opinion about Nintendo and that's not allowed, um, on the internet. But there was a Neogaff.

• 51:43Nilay Patel?

  I will say that is definitely not allowed. We had people in our comments who were arguing and one of the people said to the other person, "You're just a fake Nintendo fan." Which is, like, incredible.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 51:55Nilay Patel?

  And I didn't know if I should get in there or I should just like let it sit there as like a, a piece of artwork.

• 52:01Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 52:01Nilay Patel?

  Like, don't disturb it. Anyway, Dieter, continue. You're saying Neogaff.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  So the Switch is not, oh, there's a Neogaff thread that agreed with me, therefore every, I'm right, because Neogaff.

• 52:10Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if that's how that works at all.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  No, I'm real mad that the Nintendo Switch is, uh, not launching with support for Netflix or web browser. Uh, it'll come later. And my contention is that, uh, I don't trust Nintendo to do it later and do it right. I want them to do it sooner and... You know, the whole reason the Wii was successful was that it broadened the market to non gamers and it's clear that like that's Nintendo's move. They don't just appeal to the hardcore. And what better way to broaden the market than do the basic tablet things that, you know, my ma wants to do. Like, I guarantee you, my, my mother keeps a Wii in the house for the grandkids.

• 52:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  She is never gonna go buy a Switch because she'd be like, I don't need this. I like that we've got the Wii. But if it like would let her, you know, watch Netflix in bed and maybe do some web browsing and like, hell, put the Kindle e-reader on that and replace her Kindle, she'd buy it in a flash, in a heartbeat.

• 53:18Nilay Patel?

  But she'd buy it because it did those things, not the...

• 53:21Speaker 01

  So why doesn't she just get a Kindle? It would give her permission and then she'd start playing the video games.

• 53:25Nilay Patel?

  She should just buy a Fire tablet.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  No, this is, that's, the Fire tablet's actually the, the perfect example. Like, this thing could sell to more people if it, they just like positioned it to also replace a Fire tablet. The thing that's gonna, the thing that broadened the market for the Wii is it was cheap and it had like fun motion controls. So you could like have party time with your family. I don't think that's, that move is gonna work again.

• 53:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Uh, so they need some other move to get, you know,

• 53:52Nilay Patel?

  I mean, we're talking about Amazon, why not just make it a Fire tablet? Just let Amazon do it. What, what scares me about your, your thesis here is, uh, Nintendo making software.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 54:04Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like the idea of a Nintendo web browser, we've all lived through it once or twice in our lives.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 54:10Nilay Patel?

  It's not a good, they don't know what they're doing, kinda situation. The, like, like the idea of them building an OS and like letting you, like all of that to me is terrifying. If they were just to like use Android and not skin it, which they almost certainly would.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  By the way, the Nvidia Shield just got new get.

• 54:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there you go. And this is like substantially the same hardware.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Basically a shield.

• 54:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I, it's just like, I don't know why they don't just, I think there's like an easy way for them to do it. And then there's the way that Nintendo thinks they should do it. And I think the way that Nintendo thinks they should do it is to design consumer facing software.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  With like buttons that look like plastic blobs.

• 54:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like Aqua. It's like they took

• 54:49Speaker 01

  It is Aqua.

• 54:50Nilay Patel?

  A bunch of old Aqua mocks and they're like, just, people like that and like they don't... That's where they are.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  I think that's my knee jerk reaction to why I disagree with you, Dieter, is because the mental image of Nintendo, because like they're also like delaying their multiplayer stuff.

• 55:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  Like internet multiplayer. It's like, you know what? I don't really go to Nintendo for the excellence in internet multiplayer. So I do think the hook with the Switch is this idea of playing multiplayer Mario Kart with your friends in random places so they don't always have to come over to your house.

• 55:27Nilay Patel?

  I don't think that's the hook.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  Dig out the game.

• 55:30Nilay Patel?

  I agree with Dieter. I think one of the big hooks for the Switch could be if you're the sort of person who travels with a laptop, an iPad, and a phone. And I do that all the time. I think Dieter does that pretty regularly, too. You could replace your iPad, which you're probably using as your e-reader and Netflix device, with the Switch. And then you could get really good games, too. And it'll have controllers and all that stuff.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so rather than like make, I made that argument, but I actually think the stronger argument is there's a bunch of people who are never going to go buy a PlayStation and who are never going to go buy an Xbox, like, non-gamers. But, like, they've got, like, grandkids and kids and whatever, and they might be interested in playing Nintendo if it was like, if they could like justify it. And the thing that lets them justify it is, oh, it does a few other things, right? Like, instead of thinking about it in terms of a tablet, think about it in terms of a Roku or, you know, the Wii for a while had the biggest Netflix install base of all the consoles. If they just did that, then, you know, they're going to the store like, oh, that's right, the Nintendo does that. Plus, maybe I could play a game every now and then.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  And then all of a sudden, you've turned grandma into a hardcore gamer. Good job, Nintendo.

• 56:44Speaker 02

  She's calling people racist names on Call of Duty.

• 56:48Nilay Patel?

  She's like, pwned.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  Grandma, what happened to you? Well, it started with the Netflix.

• 56:55Nilay Patel?

  NightmareGrandma.com. Yeah, we're gonna, all the people who are pwning people now, they're gonna eventually one day be grandparents.

• 57:02Speaker 02

  I know, I think about that a lot.

• 57:04Nilay Patel?

  We just, time keeps relentlessly turning assholes into parents.

• 57:10Nilay Patel?

  It just keeps happening.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 57:13Nilay Patel?

  Let's all, let's all just end it now. Do we need to talk about anything else here? We've got a bunch of other stuff on our list.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  We don't have time to get into what's going on in the FCC.

• 57:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just Jake.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  Everything is, everything's unregulated now.

• 57:23Nilay Patel?

  No, it's getting there. FCC's doing a bunch of stuff. Jake is on the beat. I think as we were recording this, he put up a kind of a curtain raiser talking what's going on. But Ajit Pai, our buddy Ajit, every day I get an email about him changing some procedure at the FCC. And it's always.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  Would you say that he's like real worked up and angry right now?

• 57:41Nilay Patel?

  He's, he's agitated. Is that where you're going?

• 57:43Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 57:44Nilay Patel?

  That's what's going there.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:45Nilay Patel?

  Agitated.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Oh man, we had a chance to end the podcast.

• 57:50Nilay Patel?

  But I will say this, you should read the Jake article. We're gonna do a bunch more. We've already had a bunch. But if you're listening to this, here's what I want you to do. Ajit Pai is a hardcore nerd. Again, I think he's a super intelligent, super interesting guy, super nerdy. I know he reads The Verge. He's on the Twitter. So if you're listening to this, he's at Ajit Pai FCC. A J I T P A I FCC. Just tweet at him. Tell him to come on The Vergecast. We can make this movement happen.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  That'd be pretty cool.

• 58:21Nilay Patel?

  We should do it. Apollo's been asking me to do it. I did it today.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:24Nilay Patel?

  But everybody else, tweet at him. Be like, go on The Vergecast. Talk to, talk to Neil and Paul.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  Don't dox him.

• 58:28Nilay Patel?

  Don't dox it. No, no, don't be cool. Be fucking cool.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Don't, don't, yeah, don't be mean.

• 58:32Nilay Patel?

  Be super cool to him.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Yell at him.

• 58:34Nilay Patel?

  But just be like Ajit.

• 58:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's, I think it's interesting because, and I would love to hear what he'd have to say because I've read a lot of his stuff that's more like oriented towards like the Wall Street Journal type.

• 58:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:46Speaker 02

  Audience, or to a more political audience. But from a technical standpoint, I think he has some, some thoughts.

• 58:53Nilay Patel?

  He's like a Battlestar fan. Like he belongs on the show. So Ajit Pai FCC, tweet him, tell him to come on The Vergecast. I think he'll be really fun. But anyway, a bunch of FCC stuff is happening. I have a. There's a bunch of like content nonsense. Apple hired a guy, the guy who runs Amazon Fire TV to come run Apple TV. Facebook hired a woman from MTV to go run original content. HBO Now.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  YouTube and Google, YouTube Music and Google Play are gonna maybe be the same.

• 59:16Nilay Patel?

  And maybe I'll finally use Google Play, people. Although I will say I love YouTube Red. I just like stuff. There's stuff happening in the world. And all these, all of, all of the gadget companies and tech companies are becoming content companies. I think it's really interesting. But that's it. That was just the last update here.

• 59:31Speaker 02

  It's a lot of content out there. Do you ever think there's too much content?

• 59:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you should cut your media diet down to the verge on every platform. Let me tell you what those platforms are. We're at Verge on Twitter. We're Verge on Snapchat.

• 59:43Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:44Nilay Patel?

  We're Verge on Instagram. We're something on YouTube. Just type in The Verge, you'll find us. And we're theverge.com on a platform I know and love is the world wide web.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 59:54Nilay Patel?

  Check it out.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  Thanks, Tim Berners-Lee.

• 59:56Nilay Patel?

  You're great. You're a great guy. Speaking of platforms, podcasts are a type of media that we make. We're a bunch of them. Walt and I host Control+Delete. We got deep on Flipboard yesterday.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 1:00:06Nilay Patel?

  I mean, and-

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  Oh, we're on Flipboard too, by the way.

• 1:00:08Nilay Patel?

  Oh, we're on Flipboard. There's a new version of Flipboard. Get out there. But yeah, I was like, I miss RSS. Basically an hour of that, so you can listen to that on Control+Delete. Andrew, who's sitting right next to me, because we're not yet in our new podcast studio. Andrew's doing all kinds of crazy stuff on the Verge Extra feed. Go listen to that stuff. Lauren Good, who's wonderful, hosts Too Embarrassed to Ask on the Recode side. Kara Swisher hosts Recode Decode. Peter Kafka hosts Recode Media. All this stuff is on iTunes. Go find it. I usually tell you, like, give us five stars. I'm changing my little, my little call to action this week. Tell a friend. Tell an actual human being that you listen to this podcast and like it.

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  In the meats, please?

• 1:00:44Nilay Patel?

  And then take their phone away and download it on their phone for them. It's a little bit more aggressive than giving us five stars on iTunes, but I think you'll find that you enjoy it far more.

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  Go to, go to your friend's house. If, if they're the kind of friend that you can tell them to turn off motion smoothing, they're the kind of friend that you can take their phone and-

• 1:01:01Nilay Patel?

  We should definitely do a friendship levels chart.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  That's pretty good. I, I cannot get my parents into podcasts.

• 1:01:08Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  Like, I've tried to explain podcasts to them so many times. My parents will sit there and search YouTube for, like, illegal copies of Hallmark movies to watch.

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  But they won't download, the app's already on their phone, they won't subscribe to a podcast.

• 1:01:24Nilay Patel?

  Podcasts are hard to listen to. They are. I, actually, we were talking about Kara. Kara was on Ezra Klein's podcast this week, which is super interesting. You should go read it. Ezra Klein Show, somewhere on iTunes. Listen to it, but then he's, he's kind of runs our rival sister site, so then just tell him you like The Verge better.

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  And then dox him.

• 1:01:45Nilay Patel?

  Don't dox Ezra. Don't do that. Anyway, you should go listen to that. But I was like, listening to it, because I love them both. And I was like, I can't wait to just read the transcript of this. Because it's so much, I, I just consume information faster that way. I think, I think it's hard to transition into being a podcast kind of person. Like, our show, you would not want to read a transcript of this. Because it's nonsense.

• 1:02:10Nilay Patel?

  But our show like washes over you like a comforting blanket of friendship. Like, the, the podcasts I listen to for information, I might add, rather.

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  Use your brother, yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:02:20Nilay Patel?

  Rock and roll.

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  Paul.

• 1:02:21Nilay Patel?

  Paul. Wait, I know, hold on, hold on, hold on. Crizal.

• 1:02:26Speaker 02

  Let this upcoming ad wash over you.

• 1:02:29Nilay Patel?

  Like a blanket of friendship. Also, you'll be able to see that blanket wash over you.

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  Zero glare.

• 1:02:34Nilay Patel?

  Zero glare. Thank you again to Crizal No-Glare Lenses sponsoring us today. If you're glasses, you know about the fingerprints, the smudges, the scratches, the glares. They're just, they're just in your face, literally in your face, they're a huge distraction. That's why you should wear Crizal No-Glare Lenses. They give you a clear solution, possibly offering resistance to glares, scratches, and smudges. That means, my friends, no more blinding glares from the headlights of oncoming traffic while driving, no more fingerprint smudges from taking your glasses on off, scratches from cleaning your lens on your shirt. You look better, you feel better, and most importantly, you're prepared for whatever comes your way with clear vision. Go to Crizal.com, that's C-R-I-Z-A-L dot com, and start living life in the clear. That's our show. We'll see you next week. I'm at Reckless, Paul's future Paul, Dieter's at Backlon. We'll be back to haunt you forever. Rock and roll.

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  Paul.