The Selfish Ledger, YouTube Premium, and One Plus 6

The Vergecast trio comes together this week to discuss an internal Google video that was obtained by The Verge titled “the Selfish Ledger.” That topic takes up a good chunk of the show, but there’s a lot more after that. Nilay, Paul, and Dieter jump into other Google-related topics, like what’s happening to YouTube Red, Google Duplex theories, and a list of gadget news. They were able to fit in Paul’s weekly segment he does every week “Don’t block my chain,” so if you listen to it all, you’ll get it all. 04:04 - Google’s Selfish Ledger is an unsettling vision of Silicon Valley social engineering 19:02 - Apple Watch behavioral science 19:47 - Google Duplex demo, or say whether the calls were edited 23:56 - Google Chrome is removing the secure indicator from HTTPS sites in September 28:12 - Entire Nest ecosystem of smart home devices goes offline 30:16 - YouTube Music and YouTube Premium announced as YouTube Red replacement 39:28 - OnePlus 6 announced with a glass back and a notched 6.3-inch display 41:42 - The RED Hydrogen One is coming to AT&T and Verizon this summer 44:16 - Onkyo’s receivers will work with Sonos, thanks to upcoming June firmware update 46:33 - A new Wi-Fi standard could let different mesh routers work together 48:41 - Paul’s weekly segment “Don’t block my chain” 52:46 - Microsoft’s Surface Hub 2 is designed for an office of the future 53:29 - Microsoft reportedly working on $400 Surface tablets to compete with the iPad 53:44 - The desktop belongs to Electron 1:01:38 - Uber CEO: our future won’t just be cars 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hey, this is Casey Newton, Silicon Valley editor at The Verge. And if you're listening to this, I'm already dead. Just kidding, I've got even better news. I've got a new podcast for you. It's called Converge, and it's an interview game show featuring the biggest personalities in tech. Each week, a new guest steps into the hot seat to talk about their wildest dreams. It is a lifelong dream to be on a game show. And I tell them not to stand on my chair.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  This is the most fun I've ever had on a podcast.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  We'll bring you fresh games, new ideas, and a sense of what it's like to build a company from the people who are actually doing it. Then, at the end of every episode, we solve a murder. The first episode drops Wednesday, May 23rd, wherever you get your podcasts. You've never heard a tech show like this.

• 0:48Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Verge and everything. I have some news based on what Paul just told me. We are now an ASMR webcast. That's where the buddies at. You can pay for us on Twitch Prime. Paul will just be whispering your name whenever he wants. No, no, no, this is a show about technology, culture, mostly Google, Duffin it, which is what today is going to be about. But before we begin, by the way, it's just three of us today, old school. I'm Neelai, that's Paul. Hello. Dieter's here.

• 1:20Speaker 03

  I was the one scratching the microphone. I'm very sorry.

• 1:23Nilay Patel?

  Well, you just made somebody very happy, Dieter. Someone got tingles. Before we begin, I want to tell you all that we have been promising on the show for months, literally months, that Casey Newton I was starting to lose faith. would launch a podcast called Converge. It's happening. We even did like a fake pilot on this show. And then we made people wait weeks after that. But it's happening.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  So Converge is a play on words.

• 1:49Nilay Patel?

  Converge.

• 1:50Speaker 03

  It's great. And I know Neelai is about to give you like the actual details of how to subscribe and so on, and that's all really important. But I just want to point out that there's another meaning of con, which is like anti or bad. And so I think The Vergecast is like angel verge, and Casey is going to do the evil verge. Oh.

• 2:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  Like, we're, we're pro Verge, he's Converge.

• 2:08Speaker 04

  He's like dark matter.

• 2:09Nilay Patel?

  Casey is literally assigning people scores for how well they do as he interviews them, which is amazing. So Converge is a game show interview. We've got the trailer before the show, you probably already heard it, but I just want to tell you, go find Converge on the podcast app of your choice, Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, whatever. Hit subscribe. First episode comes out next week. It's super great. It's with the COO of House Party, uh, which is a video chat app. Spoiler, I've heard the show already.

• 2:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:36Nilay Patel?

  It's one of the privileges of my position. I laughed and laughed. It's great. So.

• 2:40Speaker 04

  And he's mostly interviewing like startup people in Silicon Valley.

• 2:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So one of the things, Casey and I have talked about this a bunch, the news is usually overwhelmingly negative, but there are still people out there in this world who are making stuff and who have ideas, and they have ideas about how things should work. They have ideas about how they should sell those things to people, what they should make, why they should make it, what they should and should not be doing. And Casey really wanted to bring that energy to a show, and we thought a game show would be a really fun way to do it. So he's got all kinds of games and segments to just let people into the world of how these people who are building technology products think. And then he's also really mean.

• 3:17Speaker 03

  Also, he solves murders.

• 3:18Nilay Patel?

  Also, he solves murders. So just check out Converge, it's really great. Uh, I just want to congratulate Ashley and Caitlin, who wrapped up the third, the second season of Why'd You Push That Button? And I will tell you this, Caitlin just sort of confidently promised that there would be a third season at the end of the, the season finale.

• 3:33Speaker 04

  Really want another season.

• 3:35Nilay Patel?

  I think it's gonna happen. I'll tell you, it's, it's gonna happen. I love that show. So congratulations to them. That was a great season. That will be coming back soon. But right now, that's over. So it's Why'd You Push That Button? Filters out of your life. Filter Converge in.

• 3:48Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:48Nilay Patel?

  See how this is going?

• 3:49Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:49Nilay Patel?

  Everyone else is smarter than us.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  But don't, don't sleep on the flagship.

• 3:53Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's like everyone else has these like seasons, like they begin and end, they take a break. We've just been doing this every week for like a decade with no end in sight. But here we go. Let's begin. I gotta say, I said Google duffed it this week.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:07Nilay Patel?

  Vlad published a huge scoop today about the selfish ledger. Which, Dieter, can you pull this apart? Again, I'm still, by the way, technically on leave. So I read this story, but I kind of have no idea what the context here is. Dieter, can you explain what's going on with the selfish ledger?

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Okay, so in 2016, the person who is the head of design at X, which is the moonshot factory inside Alphabet, but in 2016 they're a part of Google, he also is in charge of this thing called the Near Future Laboratory, or he co-founded, I don't know if he's in charge. And so they like to do this thing where they make these speculative fiction videos, or like, you know, write stories or whatever of like what the future might look like. And this is one of these videos. And so it's not a thing that Google's actually doing. It's not a thing that they proposed to do. Google contends that this is a thing that they were using as a thought experiment for, you know, stuff that they won't do, or what, imagine what would happen if they did do it.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  I don't know if I fully buy that angle because the, watching the video, it doesn't really like read so terrifying Black Mirror dystopia that you think that the people who made it actually think it's a bad idea.

• 5:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Here's the gist of the video. Like, look, there was this failed pre-Darwinian explanation of how evolution works, and it was wrong, but there's an interesting idea built into that, which is, what if there were these genes, and the genes are actually the thing that matter more than a person's individual will as they live their life? And there's a parallel to that with the data on your phone. And so what if we treated the data on your phone like a gene? And so as evolution continues, the data itself is the thing that expresses its will at a population level, and the user of that data is just, happens to be another person that happens to have that data, have those genes or whatever.

• 5:57Nilay Patel?

  Wouldn't it be easier to just grow people in pods and combine them with a type of fusion to create energy for the robots?

• 6:04Speaker 03

  I'm almost done. So if you think about data in that way, then a bunch of interesting things happen. You can pass that data down to your children, like your genes. When you design, you don't design for the user, you design for the data, and you manipulate the user in service of the data in the same way. Way that, I don't know, my genes manipulate me into liking ice cream, even though it's not good for me because it makes it more likely that I will get enough calories to survive. I don't know, whatever. And so it just runs through all of these implications and ends with like, I mean, it's got like bees being creepy and insects and blah. And then it ends with like, you know, what if we change the whole world by subtly giving people prompts on their phone based on the needs of the data such that we can change human behavior

• 6:48Speaker 03

  at a population level and make the world a better place?

• 6:50Speaker 04

  One of the, one of the great, most practical things that happens in the actual video is the algorithm realizes that it doesn't know the weight of a certain user. And that obviously can't stand.

• 7:07Speaker 04

  You need the data because the data is the most important thing. So the algorithm, I think it starts shopping for a scale. I don't think it finds any scales to its liking. So it basically creates a device that it can advertise to the user at a correct price that obviously they know the user can, will go for it, to get the user to buy the scale in order to add that data point to this.

• 7:33Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 7:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  So then you'll have a scale.

• 7:34Speaker 04

  So. Yeah.

• 7:35Speaker 03

  So let me, let me just, because this was an internal video. It was not meant for public consumption. We asked Google, we asked X about it, and this is their statement. "We understand if this is disturbing, it is designed to be. This is a thought experiment by the design team from years ago, it was only two years ago, that uses a technique known as, quote, speculative design to explore uncomfortable ideas and concepts in order to provoke discussion and debate. It is not related to any current or future products." So Google's very strong contention and like, this is true is that they don't, they didn't actually intend to do anything with this. But I still think that this was one of the most boneheaded things that that company has produced in a while, second only to duplex.

• 8:18Nilay Patel?

  Google has not had a great week. And I, you know, the larger context, I actually took all the Facebook out of our show today because we've talked about Facebook so much, but the context is Facebook has just had this incredibly rough run and the entire time of that run, there's been this quiet chorus of people saying, hey, Google does all this stuff too. And the reason we gave Google a pass is Google's utility is higher to the average user, right? The, the trade off you make with Facebook is, you know, you see your ex-girlfriend's family and it makes you feel bad, or you see some fake news or whatever. And that the value you're getting back from Facebook in exchange for the value that you're giving them and their aggregate and selling

• 9:02Nilay Patel?

  is like, it's hazy. So you can, it's easy to make them the villain and the utility you get from Google, which provides probably your email, which provides search, which provides YouTube, like because of the value of that trade is higher, we're not looking at it as closely, but it's always been coming.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  I, I would add to that. I feel like Google doesn't have a, a virality problem where I give Google some information and then it seems to like leak out everywhere else. I'm sure it does in lots of ways and obviously it does majorly with advertising, but it was a lot more tangible with Facebook that if you told Facebook something, it might be used in, by a random company to do a random thing. With Google, you feel like you're giving Google the information so Google can do something.

• 9:46Nilay Patel?

  No, this is, so I refuse to use Facebook login and I happily use Google login. I could not tell you why.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  I do think there's a sense where that, one of the things that Google hasn't had to deal with, but Facebook has is that there's the news feed and people spend hours analyzing the news feed and is it showing fake news and is it showing real news and is it making people biased and is it putting people in bubbles, et cetera, et cetera. And I've always sort of been, not as loudly as maybe I could, but sort of saying, hey, you know, Google has a news feed too, just no one pays attention to it because it's just sitting on most Android phones. And now that news feed is very explicit and very public and potentially very influential, at least as influential as Apple news, if not more, depending on how successful it is because they've got a proper, you know, Google news.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  App that has a feed that's called for you that shows you stuff and that is making editorial judgments on another section called headlines that will just show you everything from everybody that and Google picks the stories. And so this whole question of is Google affecting society or not is going to become as sharp or could become as sharp as the Facebook news feed.

• 10:49Nilay Patel?

  And that has already been there with YouTube, right? You see.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Right. Yep.

• 10:52Nilay Patel?

  You see dodgy Facebook videos instantly after every event. It has already been there in Google autocomplete. There's been a wild range of stories about that. Adrian Jeffries did a bunch of great autocomplete stories when she was at the outline. I mean, it's there. So I bring that up all as just the context, right? Everything that's been happening at Facebook, you can apply to Google in like pretty serious ways. And I think it hasn't happened because of that much higher perceived utility that you get from Google in exchange for giving it your data. But when I hear that statement, this was just a thought experiment designed to make people uncomfortable. What I think about most of all is A, that's what science fiction is for.

• 11:32Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 11:32Nilay Patel?

  So like you, okay, you have a science fiction team, but like science fiction authors don't usually have the world's biggest AI company sitting next to them being like, oh, that's a good idea, right? Like they don't have the ability to turn their bad ideas into reality at the scale and ambition that Google does. And second, science fiction is supposed to serve as a deterrent in those ways. Like you don't want to build the matrix. Black Mirror is supposed to show you dark realities. 1984 was supposed to be a dark reality after the end of World War II, right? It's like Facebook bought Oculus. Oculus very famously used to give everybody a copy of Ready Player One when they got hired at the company.

• 12:15Nilay Patel?

  You know, the, the conversation on Ready Player One has changed dramatically, right? In terms of how people view it, is this just entertainment? Is this a vision of the future? Is this actually just like a weird, deeply flawed book about one man's wish fulfillment that like is actually really exclusive, like exclusionary to a lot of people. To use that kind of fiction is like difficult, right? Like the way we contextualize fiction changes over time again and again and again. So to create your own fiction and be like, that does not explicitly say, this is the future we are trying to avoid. But instead, this is just an ex- you should watch this video. If you haven't watched the video, go watch the video on the site. It is a pretty happy video. It is a pretty charming video.

• 12:54Speaker 04

  I will say, to bolster their claims that this is just speculative, I feel like the music is a little foreboding. It's not happy.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  The music is a little foreboding.

• 13:02Speaker 04

  It's not happy ukulele.

• 13:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:04Speaker 04

  Right?

• 13:04Nilay Patel?

  But it's not one of those like cartoon, here's a new app videos.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  If, if, if you're a futurist and you want to make these Black Mirror videos and you, and you want to like have it be artistic and, you know, compelling to watch, I get that. But to Neelai's point, if you're Google, in particular, the idea that you care more about the data on the user's phone than you do about the user itself is, goes to the very heart of whether or not people trust your company. And you should consider that thing radioactive and you should never approach letting anybody in your company express that idea without immediately also expressing the other thing. And this isn't about censoring Google internally in their internal communications, whatever. Uh, it's, it's just like, it's, it's shockingly naive to think that someone would make this

• 13:50Speaker 03

  thing and not realize that what he's done is like grabbed hold of the third rail of like Google and its trust problem, potential trust problem, and shook it.

• 13:59Speaker 04

  To make that more concrete, so the way it's explained in the video, they're referencing the selfish gene concept. The idea that genes, it's not survival of the fittest as far as like individuals or species, it's survival of the fittest genes. And therefore genes, you're kind of personifying them when you're talking about them in this way, but genes will value their survival over the survival of their host. So, it, it, the video makes it pretty clear that they're talking about valuing the data that's collected about people over the people.

• 14:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Let me try, let me, let me just do, well, let me say one more piece of criticism about this.

• 14:44Speaker 04

  And then I got one more.

• 14:45Nilay Patel?

  Oh, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  Well, I've been working on a sci fi novel on and off forever. Uh, recently pivoted to a new one and I was very sad when we ran the story because I feel like Google stole my thunder. So I kept my, my, my concept was called the algorithm.

• 15:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:02Speaker 04

  And the whole world was run by like a, a, a, a single algorithm that was designed to, to maximize happiness. And it was based on the desires that it could detect of humans. So you're writing a sci fi novel, of course, it's gotta have some sort of dystopia. So it's like, well, what's my dystopia here? Like, I'm trying to create like, uh, something that's as utopia as possible. It seems like this is the best case scenario, the best algorithm ever. What's wrong with it? Misanthropy.

• 15:31Nilay Patel?

  Ooh.

• 15:32Speaker 04

  If you base an algorithm based on what everybody wants, what you, what companies can, or what gadgets and, and AI algorithms can detect about what people actually want, some people want to hurt other people.

• 15:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they really do.

• 15:49Speaker 04

  And anyways, that's where I'm, that's where I'm at with my sci fi novel.

• 15:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, if you are a book publisher, you got half a pitch that has already been upended by reality. But Paul's available.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  Sweet.

• 15:58Nilay Patel?

  At future Paul on Twitter. But I'm, so I'm with you on that. I think it's not only that people want to hurt each other, it's that this implies that there is an objective best life for you to live.

• 16:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:10Nilay Patel?

  And that a computer system can nudge you into it. And I, that is just not true. Like, the reason we bang on about diversity and inclusiveness is that the world is like better when everyone is living slightly different lives and like creating things that like change us as opposed to an army of like wage slaves who are buying things. Like, how did Google expect to make any money off of this? Like, they sell ads.

• 16:40Nilay Patel?

  Like, how do you target ads when everyone is the same? Because the algorithm has nudged them towards total conformity.

• 16:49Speaker 04

  Well, I think this is an important, this is an important thing for all people in power to understand. Because I think we've learned a lot, there's been a lot of like recent research about how humans may or may not do things that are against their own interest. And I think that's true in a lot of cases. And it kind of depends on like, maybe it's against your short term interests, or it's for your long term, or it's for your short term and it's against your long term. But just because people do things that are against their own interests does not mean that an outside third party is gonna have a very good shot at doing something better for that person's own interests.

• 17:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, alright, who wants to play devil's advocate and make the case for this video to exist?

• 17:32Speaker 04

  This video is great if Google says, hey, this looks like exactly where we're headed as a company. Do we want to do that to people?

• 17:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:42Speaker 04

  And if it was explicitly presented in that sort of context, like, yo, we need to have a conversation because we're trying to learn everything about people and we're trying to mold their actions. You know, they, Google presented a lot of stuff trying to help people, you know, use their devices less or be more, you know, more what's called mindfulness. At the recent Google I O, you know, Google is interested in not just collecting data about people, but also helping people shape their actions to be quote unquote, better for those people. So Google's on this path. And so it's something Google should be thinking about, and I hope it was presented in that context.

• 18:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, if this was a-

• 18:19Speaker 03

  We just don't know the answer to that question. Like, it was an internal thing and maybe it was presented at like, alright, let's have a symposium on shit we should never do. And they kicked it off with that video. Like, that's totally possible.

• 18:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that, but that's the moment we're in now, right? For every tech company, like, obviously, Google and Facebook, because of their data collection- You know, the focus is on them, the scrutiny is on them. But if you think about just behavior modification as a goal of tech companies, A, they all want to do it. They all want to make you use their app more. So they're definitely trying to make your behavior sticky. And second, you know, if you have an Apple Watch, it will literally tap you on the wrist and be like, "Stand up."

• 18:56Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 18:56Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's wild, right? Like, it's the same thing. And there's just this idea. Liz Lapata wrote an entire piece for us. Amazing feature, you should go back and read it, about behaviorism in the Apple Watch and how it's designed to adjust your behavior towards what Apple believes is a more healthy outcome, what might objectively be a more healthy outcome. But they're all trying to modify your behavior in this way. And that's like a new... You know, I was joking at the start of the show, like, we've just been banging on in this show in one way or another for like 10 years. Like, 10 years ago, we're like, "New laptops are here." They have rectangles for screens instead of squares.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  When will Netflix come to the Xbox?

• 19:34Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, now, look. Apple wants you to stand up and Google wants you to be a human in a pod. Like, we're a little bit off the rails. All right, so that's one... That's one Google thing.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  Uh-huh.

• 19:46Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, there's also a great piece, Dan Primack in Axios wrote about Google Duplex today. And he did something that was very smart. I wish we'd all done it. He said, "Hey, what hair salon and restaurant did you call?" Because it's pretty weird that they answer the phone and they don't say, "Hey, you called so-and-so restaurant." They just say hello.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:05Nilay Patel?

  Do you have any follow-up on that, Dieter?

• 20:06Speaker 03

  Uh, no. They just, like, Google refused to answer. They just, you know, and like, I really get the sense that they made this thing, they were really happy at the, like, during the keynote reaction, and then everything since and they're like, "Oh, God." Uh, and like, they just, they don't, they would really like the conversation and move on. And so they tried to no comment it. And it might be because the answers are like, "Not great." Maybe it wasn't a real demo. Maybe it was staged in some way. Although, like, I don't know, someone asked me if, like, am I now on board with all of these Google Duplex truthers? I don't know if it was real or not. I mean, I guess I assume it was and they just edited it. But I mean, at some point, like, the thing isn't going away. They should just, they should just

• 20:50Speaker 03

  have somebody come out, say some stuff, answer some questions, and then they can move on. Because this, like, hoping we're all gonna stop talking about it is not working for them.

• 20:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, it was the star of their show. Like, how do you, it would be like if they put out a trailer for the next Avengers movie and they're like, okay, now everyone stop. Stop all speculation about this blockbuster movie that we've, like, this was the thing. It was the highlight of their, their I/O presentation. And to not have anything ready to follow up, I think is kind of awkward.

• 21:21Speaker 04

  And I think a big part of this, I'm very proud of the, of the Edge Computing piece I did a little, a few weeks back, just because I just see more and more of these, these software companies plan to be responsible for the end-to-end everything of everything. And so when you launch or announce a product that is somehow is so, is so large, it has such a large reach and has so many implications, you have to, you have to think it through. If, if, if the selfish Ledger video, or the Google Duplex thing, if they're tech demos, if they were explaining, like, yo, here's how we could, we could store data for, for passing on to

• 22:02Speaker 04

  your kids, you know, as a technology, instead of a, here's how we change the entire world because we, as an ambitious company, want to run the entire world?

• 22:15Nilay Patel?

  Well, so Ben Thompson, who runs TechCrunch, a great newsletter, website, media experience that you can have, but well worth it. He wrote a thing after all these developer conferences where he was like, Apple and Microsoft and Google and Facebook occupy different ends of a spectrum. Apple and Microsoft make you tools, and Google and Facebook want, want the tools to do things for you. Right? And like, that's why their approach to privacy is just like radically different. Right? Apple, once you buy the tool from Apple and Microsoft, they kind of don't care. They would like some data to help improve the tools that they can make better tools. But Google, I mean, literally their tagline is make Google do it for you. Right? So in order to do things for you, they need to have this vast amount of data so they can predict what you might want done and how you might want it done.

• 22:58Nilay Patel?

  And I think this, that is the framework for both the selfish ledger and for duplex. Like, how much do you want your tools to go out and do things for you? And that's in, you know, the history of technology, all technology really ever does for you is like automate things, like just up a chain of complexity.

• 23:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 23:16Nilay Patel?

  And at some point, you're like, okay, stop, like, we got as far as please encode the video for me. They're like, right, like, please bring me a selection of videos instead of me going to a video store. Like, you've automated that process, but I don't need you to literally film me all day, every day, and then make a selection of videos for me out of my life, which is something that Google will happily do for me.

• 23:35Speaker 04

  They would love to.

• 23:36Nilay Patel?

  Like that, all that is like-

• 23:37Speaker 04

  It's true, like, there's certain things where it's like, hey, that's part of, that's part of what I think of as living on earth. Those are like things that I was excited to do.

• 23:47Nilay Patel?

  Again, so you could just grow the people in that, and then combine them with the type of fusion to power your AI construct. All right, so that's like all very heady. But Paul, I want to ask you about something. We got, there's a bunch of actual Google things happening. And I want to start with, which is gonna sound very weedy, but I think it's important. They're removing the secure indicator from HTTPS websites. So they're, they're flipping the user expectation. So right now it says secure.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  Right.

• 24:13Nilay Patel?

  In September, you get a little lock icon in Chrome, just in Chrome. But what's gonna happen is they're taking away the lock icon. So your expectation is that everything is HTTPS.

• 24:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:23Nilay Patel?

  And if you go to a non-secure website, it will say not secure. So Google's trying to push the whole web towards HTTPS. From what I can tell, this is actually much more controversial than it seems. Because I would like everything to be HTTPS, but that like has some like, A, there's like certificate authorities in the mix. There's a little bit of web centralization, like, it's a big move for Chrome to just like impose this on the web.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  I don't know, I feel like the HTTPS transition has been pretty, uh, well engineered. Uh, there was this big effort called Let's Encryp. Because, yeah, I've, I've, I've like helped, like, my dad has a graphic design company. They make a bunch of WordPress sites, right? I have like- Called a certificate authority on the phone and got like a certificate to put HTTPS on a site because it needed it for like an online store. It was a pain in the ass and it's not a pain in the ass anymore. Let's encrypt is software. I think Mozilla helped a lot with it. A lot of big tech companies were part of this initiative to make it basically a almost automatic part of spinning up a web server.

• 25:30Speaker 04

  So anything that is built now and new, it's almost by default that you have HTTPS. And there are so many reasons and so many vulnerabilities when you don't have HTTPS that it's just, it's just too huge of a liability to, I mean, well, I'm happy that nowadays it's hard to find

• 25:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  a non HTTPS site. I think it's a great achievement of the tech community and yeah, Google's going to be a little heavy handed with it, but I feel like they should because it is such a huge security hole.

• 26:06Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, do you see the flaw here?

• 26:07Speaker 03

  I mean, in theory, you are making it harder to make a webpage and that's bad for, you know, indie people who want to make something for the web. It in theory makes the web slightly less open, but in practice, I think Paul's right. It's not that hard to get HTTPS and like, if you really think about it, maybe we would have been better off if it had sort of been built into the fabric of the web in the first place. So like, they're more heavy handed about it. It may cause a few problems, but I think the scale of those problems relative to the scale of the threat of not having HTTPS be like the default makes it so that I'm, I don't know, I was not upset about this at all.

• 26:49Nilay Patel?

  Well, maybe I'm the only one. I'm not really upset about it. I think I'm just upset about, I like the lock indicator, right? Like, it's like they're switching that default.

• 26:59Speaker 04

  But it's taking up some of that browser bar real estate.

• 27:03Nilay Patel?

  That switch from we are promoting security to we're punishing those that we don't deem secure enough is very punitive to me, right? The lock icon is like a reward. It's like, look for this, and you'll be happier. And like, there's a lot of ways Google can promote that and make that a thing. Or they could have the lock icon and then also have not secure. But to say, like, this is the default and the other option is punitive, I think is... It's one of those things where Google runs the web and we just have to, like, get over it sometimes. And this is what they want to do with it, so this is what's gonna happen. Like, this is what I mean. Again, it's like, Google's doing stuff.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  I wish they had one of these icons on their new text messaging platform.

• 27:51Nilay Patel?

  Rough.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  Well, actually, technically, I do believe it is, uh, end-to-server, uh, encrypted.

• 27:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but then the selfish ledger can read all your text messages and be like, "Stop talking to him."

• 28:04Nilay Patel?

  "He's a bad influence. Try to slice my screen."

• 28:06Speaker 04

  You feel sad when you text this person.

• 28:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right, two more Google things, and we gotta read that and move on to that stuff. The entire Nest ecosystem went down. This is what I mean, Google's like, duffed it a lot this week. They just put out their smart locks with Yale. They have the new Nest Protect security system. I have a Nest thermostat. They have, obviously, the cameras. Just all went offline for a while. And then they tweeted, their follow-up was like, "We're working on bringing it back. The physical controls still work." That's just rough. Like, uh, it makes me really uncomfortable to think that suddenly, like, the reason you invest in this stuff is like, remote authority and like, management, edge computing.

• 28:46Speaker 04

  Edge computing.

• 28:47Nilay Patel?

  And then like, the servers go down and like, now it's not a computer anymore, it's just a door lock.

• 28:50Speaker 04

  I got a text message today from, uh, my niece, whose Minecraft Realms server wasn't working. Like, Mojang, the creator of Minecraft, owned by Microsoft, sells, like, uh, Minecraft servers to... I mean, in this case, it's a kid paying money for a cloud service that went down. And I was like, man, I wonder how hard it would be to teach her how to set up her own. Minecraft server and get away from this centralized control.

• 29:21Nilay Patel?

  But I mean, it all just comes back to how much do you trust? As as more and more things become more and more monopolistic, like I bought Blink video cameras. And they got acquired by Amazon. And now literally the entire app is covered in Amazon logos. Like you open the app, it's like Blink powered by Amazon. And it like you get a like motion detected. And you're like, go to watch the video and the loading screen of the video is Blink powered by Amazon. It's like, I gave you the money. Um, but as everything kind of gets swallowed up, you have to put a lot of faith. Like if your life, if your door locks are Google, your cameras are Google, your thermostat is Google, your email is Google. Like I like Sundar, I think he's a good CEO, his heart's in the right place.

• 30:04Nilay Patel?

  If he leaves and like someone evil takes over, you're like, oh, fuck.

• 30:10Nilay Patel?

  Ah, I just gave you everything. All right, one more Google thing. And this one to me is the most confusing. We have talked on the show a lot about how YouTube Red is like the best. The best, one of the best products we pay for. I pay for it, do you pay for it?

• 30:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I hate ads and it's $10 a month to not see ads.

• 30:27Nilay Patel?

  That, as far as I can tell, is now $12 a month.

• 30:30Speaker 04

  Well, I'm grandfathered in, but yes. And.

• 30:34Nilay Patel?

  But so YouTube Red is going away. You will not be able to buy YouTube Red anymore.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  Right.

• 30:39Nilay Patel?

  You can buy YouTube Music, which is a music service.

• 30:43Speaker 04

  Music premium.

• 30:44Nilay Patel?

  No, there's YouTube Music and YouTube Premium.

• 30:46Speaker 04

  No, YouTube Premium and YouTube Music Premium.

• 30:49Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 30:50Speaker 04

  I'm pretty sure that's what they're called.

• 30:53Nilay Patel?

  Can, don't they, can an AI just name the things for them? So this is true. YouTube, from the CEO on down, has always thought of YouTube Red bizarrely as a music streaming service.

• 31:06Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 31:06Nilay Patel?

  Yep. Very unclear why, because they run a music streaming service. They also run another music streaming service.

• 31:16Nilay Patel?

  Google.

• 31:17Speaker 04

  Just Google.

• 31:18Nilay Patel?

  Google doesn't want, they would, they would be happy if everybody forgot that Google Play exists. In fact, they are, I think the plan is they're going to replace Google Play Music with this, one of these, one of the versions of this YouTube stuff, right? Yeah, so they should. So like the idea that you have a YouTube Music subscription instead of a Sodisite subscription makes sense.

• 31:37Speaker 04

  Hmm, yeah.

• 31:39Nilay Patel?

  Some sense.

• 31:40Speaker 04

  Their problem, Google Play Music is kind of like a Google Reader situation. They might not have a huge user base, but it's a huge user, or it's a decent sized user base of people who use it because it's a very, it's very particular to their interests. They want to be able to upload MP3s to the cloud and listen to them.

• 31:59Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think that there's like, there must be.

• 32:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:02Nilay Patel?

  But like, Apple.

• 32:03Speaker 03

  Do you think that there's a thing where, I know YouTube is part of Google, but they've got their own CEO, and maybe there's just some straight up, like, power play dynamics going on between YouTube and Google? Where YouTube's like, yo, people listen, more people listen to our music than yours, your music service, so we're just gonna do our thing. And Google's like, wait, but we have the brand and the, and they're like, well, we did it. And like, okay, well, we'll figure out Google Play Music later.

• 32:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, or it's just like a focus problem, like, I mean, again, you've talked to Sundar, I've talked to Sundar, I couldn't tell you what Sundar listens to, right? Like, is he like, deep in the weeds of his, the music experience? Like, maybe he is. Maybe Sundar has playlists, he's like, deep in it, he's got a vinyl collection. Like, I don't know the answer, but I do know that if, if the answer is he's more interested in like, AI, which is what he talks about the most, then the vagaries of how something as seemingly simple as music streaming works, he's not getting, he's not giving it the attention it needs, and you, that, you could have like, a total political power situation, or you could just not have focus.

• 33:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, and like, I will say that at Google I/O, last, was that only last week? Good lord. I saw Spotify mentioned more often than anything else. Like, in all the demos, like, and Spotify, and it'll blah, blah, blah. It was the examples on a bunch of Google Home stuff, they just, they just straight up memory hold, uh, Google Play Music, just completely.

• 33:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  So it was, it was pretty clear to me that the writing was on the wall there.

• 33:31Nilay Patel?

  I mean, look, a lot of people, what, you're sitting at a computer and you, you wanna share a song with somebody, the easiest way to do it is send a YouTube link, just by far. Everyone's guaranteed to be able to like, go watch a song on YouTube. That's like a big thing to build off of. YouTube Red with its like premium video stuff, I think their only popular show is Cobra Kai, which I haven't watched yet, but people tell me it's somewhat interesting.

• 33:52Speaker 04

  My whole thing with this is I am actively offended for every penny YouTube spends on original content trying to compete with like Netflix and HBO and Hulu instead of giving my YouTube Red money to content creators.

• 34:11Nilay Patel?

  But they are, but they are, right? They're paying content creators to make that content.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a bunch of YouTube Red shows. Nobody watches them.

• 34:19Nilay Patel?

  But like the most popular YouTubers are getting YouTube Red money. It's tr- it's true. It's just not in the way that you want it to.

• 34:26Speaker 04

  I, I get like promoted, I get promoted an ad for, it's not an ad, it's like YouTube's weird like semi-social feed of what's happening on YouTube right now, which their app is turning into. I'm scrolling through YouTube on my phone and there's like a thing like, hey, watch this YouTube Red original. And it's like, it's like a naked man on top of a naked woman. It's like, here's a cool sexy new show, right?

• 34:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:54Speaker 04

  If I was a YouTube, a regular YouTuber and I made a cool sexy new show with a naked man on top of a naked woman, that would be demonetized by YouTube.

• 35:03Nilay Patel?

  Right. Yes, it would.

• 35:04Speaker 04

  And YouTube is taking my YouTube Red money, now my YouTube Premium money, whatever they want to call it, to make shows that I have no, I don't care about at all. And I, you know, compare that to the Twitch model of directly supporting the creators. You know, like the percentage of your money, like where it goes to. It's, it's, it's pretty frustrating.

• 35:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think they've, what YouTube is in is a competition for obviously finite attention. Right? So they have to compete with Netflix. Like if you decide to spend all of your video watching time on Netflix, like you only have so many hours a day to give to, unless you, again, you are born in a vat.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, if you're in a pod, they can, they can duplicate you and then you have more hours.

• 35:49Nilay Patel?

  This is why they build self-driving cars. You're just gonna be in a self-driving car, temperature controlled, watching YouTube Red originals for $10 a month.

• 35:55Speaker 04

  Do you think Google's pod design has like a firewall and you can't hit up Netflix or Hulu?

• 36:00Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. Why do you think they're so quiet in net neutrality lately? No, that's horrible. They are suspicious. Anyway, it just seems like the simpler thing that they should do is advertise YouTube with no ads for some amount of money.

• 36:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 36:14Nilay Patel?

  YouTube Music, our new competitor to Spotify, and that's it, right? And what they're trying to do is figure out where YouTube original content that you subscribe to belongs in that mix. And I, so far, they haven't had the answer. And I think what they're realizing is so many people watch music on YouTube that they can convert those people into paying for no ads. And then they can like provide some other product. And that is distracting them from what any other human would understand is going on.

• 36:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:41Nilay Patel?

  So their data is, is driving them away from what their users are intuiting.

• 36:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:48Speaker 03

  I get the sense, though, that some of YouTube Red is also about placating music labels that are unhappy with how much free music happens on YouTube. And so YouTube Red isn't just about converting people into paying a subscription. It's also about being able to say to music labels, no, no, we're a paying service too, and here's a slightly larger cut for you. Please don't get mad at us.

• 37:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, YouTube Music, and correct me if I'm wrong, mostly feels like, like, it's like half of what I'm listening to is like, quote unquote, illegally uploaded stuff. It's stuff, uh, music that is uploaded by not the copyright holder, let's say that.

• 37:25Nilay Patel?

  But they're able to detect it and...

• 37:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, they are. But it's not like the great, it's not ideal either. I don't know.

• 37:31Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, you can definitely pitch shift your way around it. Anyway.

• 37:34Speaker 04

  Go 90. Verizon, it's your chance. Come on.

• 37:39Nilay Patel?

  I want to come back and be like...

• 37:41Speaker 04

  Give Phil DeFranco a billion dollars to do whatever the hell he wants on your platform.

• 37:48Speaker 04

  Lead a YouTube exitist because people are ready for it because YouTube does not understand their creators.

• 37:54Nilay Patel?

  I think the creators are ready for it. The users might not follow them. I think that's like the, that's, this is like being like, we should build a better iMessage from better in the United States. Like, all you, all you, there's one piece of content on YouTube that you need. You're not going to open some other app.

• 38:11Speaker 04

  I'm ready.

• 38:11Nilay Patel?

  Whatever.

• 38:12Speaker 04

  I'm ready to open.

• 38:12Nilay Patel?

  Well, that was a long list of very confusing things Google was doing.

• 38:17Nilay Patel?

  That was the first 45 minutes of our show.

• 38:22Nilay Patel?

  This episode of Verge has brought to you by TransferWise. Do you ever need to send money internationally? Don't use your bank or PayPal, says TransferWise, because they can get your money from A to B, but that transfer costs you more than it should. A lot more, it's the old way. The smarter and cheaper way to send money is TransferWise. TransferWise was founded by two friends, Tavet and Cristo, who were frustrated by their bank's bad exchange rate and high fees. So they wondered, what if we could bypass banks entirely? They built TransferWise, that was seven years ago. Today, more than 2 million people use TransferWise. People sending money home, business paying suppliers, freelancers getting paid, the list goes on and on. TransferWise's clever new technology gives you a great exchange rate and a low fee. It'll put some extra money in your pocket for the important things, because no one's ever said it's important that my bank gets extra money. Test it out for free at transferwise.com/podcast. Download the app.

• 39:07Nilay Patel?

  That's transferwise.com/podcast. It's the wise way to send money. So I have a list here of things. Some phones, some gadget news. I'm just gonna say them out loud.

• 39:20Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 39:21Nilay Patel?

  And you tell me what's going on, or how you feel. I'm gonna say a gadget, you say an emotion. Ready? OnePlus 6 announced with glass back and notched 6.3-inch display.

• 39:31Speaker 04

  Happiness.

• 39:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the notch is just here.

• 39:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:35Nilay Patel?

  It's not going away.

• 39:36Speaker 04

  Ashley pointed out, if you didn't know, The Verge does a daily newsletter called Command Line. Ashley points out that Dan Seifer, who does a lot of our reviews, points out that he's used a million flagship phones, and every one of them has some sort of problem. And those problems are always more significant than a notch.

• 39:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, you gotta put the sensor somewhere. I just don't know that, I mean, this phone, it's an OLED, but it still has a chin. If you're gonna have a chin, you can have a forehead. Most faces do. We're just not getting a lot out of the ears. You know, the iPhone X, it's been a while now. I don't get a lot out of the ears.

• 40:16Speaker 03

  You get, you don't, you get the status bar up there and so a bunch of icons and so you end up getting an extra, call it 50 pixels. And if it's well-designed, I had a, I was gonna do a whole video about this for processor, but I decided I actually don't have five minutes to say, of things to say. It's, it looks fine, it doesn't look great, but you get an extra 50 pixels. If they manage the status bar well, then you get some more usable space up there. And it's fine. And you know what? Like, a bunch of phones are gonna be notched for a while. It's a design trend. All this stuff happens with design for other objects. And so, this is the trend of this thing. And it's not that big a deal.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  Like, I really am not worked up about notches anymore.

• 41:02Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 41:03Speaker 03

  I just, I never really was, honestly.

• 41:05Nilay Patel?

  So Dieter's emotion was a Dieter face?

• 41:07Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 41:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  I just kinda shrugged.

• 41:10Nilay Patel?

  The smiley emoji with the straight line for mouth.

• 41:12Speaker 03

  My, alright. My, uh, my bigger question is, if there's a, like, we've also seen phones with notches at the bottom, but you can't call a notch at the bottom a notch. So if a notch at the top, is it like a top notch? Like a top knot? And people hate top knots and so they're annoyed by that? Is it a bottom notch? Is it a, is it a crotch? So a bottom notch would be a goatee?

• 41:29Nilay Patel?

  What do you call a notch at the bottom? I don't think we should call it a crotch. Just hard disagree on that one. Bottom notch. A botch.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  A botch. You botched it.

• 41:39Nilay Patel?

  Alright, that's horrible. Alright, next one, Dieter, this one's for you. The Red Hydrogen One coming to 18T in Verizon this summer. I will say, uh, the CEO of Red said that this one's gonna be delayed because of carrier certification, and the way he explained the problems with carrier certification was, I believe, explicitly saying, "We have no idea what we're doing." Which is great. I love that. Like, whoops, we didn't know how hard this would be. This phone, to me, seems completely insane, but I love that.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  I want to see this holographic screen. I want to know, like, that, I also have, let me count, like, amount of faith that I have that their modular system is gonna matter, like, very low. Maybe they'll do something cool with their cameras and people will just end up buying these as like, accessories for Red cameras. But the screen, man, I gotta see it. I- My sense is like, we saw Amazon try this with the Fire Phone. This is clearly something different, but am I really gonna want to buy a phone strictly for, you know, this thing that you can't see unless you see it? I don't know. I, there's just a whole lot of unanswered questions here.

• 42:42Nilay Patel?

  Shouldn't Red know that this cool displays without content aren't gonna do, I mean, they're in the content creation business, right? They make cameras. Are they gonna make a weird 3D camera to shoot for the holographic display? Like, I don't know. But I do think the Fire Phone was a disaster because it ran Fire OS. The Fire Phone had run Android and they sold it for cheap. Might have been a different thing. This is just gonna run Android.

• 43:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know. Mostly I'm mad at Red because, uh, seven years ago in, uh, at the Verge launch party.

• 43:11Nilay Patel?

  Wait, can we just stop? I'm mad at Red because seven years ago.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  That's right. Seven years ago, they launched some frickin' camera. Red Dragon, something, I don't know, whatever. Uh, but they were launching it, uh, with a terrible livestream that wasn't well-supported and nobody knew what was going on and they didn't tell anybody what was going on. And it's like a very, there's like a thing about LA companies, like Elon Musk does this too, where like, "Yeah, we're throwing an event. We'll figure it out as we go." And everyone's like, "Okay, I guess we'll figure it out with you as you go." Anyway, I couldn't go to the Verge launch party, uh, because I had to sit in a cold alley in the middle of New York, um, on my hat because the concrete was too cold to just sit on and try and put together a post about this camera that they had announced.

• 43:55Nilay Patel?

  Wow. And I feel like we gotta let that one go. Knowing what I know now.

• 44:01Nilay Patel?

  I feel like that post did not make or break the Verge at that time. I was a very dedicated person. Yeah, we were dedicated. Everything felt like life or death. Yeah. But everything is. So if this, you gotta sit on your hat and cover this phone. All right. Anki has new receivers to work with Sonos. Thanks to upcoming June firmware update.

• 44:19Speaker 04

  I think this one's for Deli.

• 44:20Nilay Patel?

  This one's for me. This makes me feel very sad. So here's a thing. I don't quite understand Sonos's business because of this. So right now, if you have a Sonos system, I have one. The only way you can make Sonos stream music wireless through your house is to buy Sonos hardware, which is a business I think we all understand. You give them money, they give you a thing, their service continues to operate. You presumably Sonos's entire business is predicated upon their customers buying ever increasingly larger houses. So you have to buy more and more speakers. I'm sure in a deck somewhere that's listed as a contingency, like customers have finite home sizes. But you have to like pay them some money to buy more speakers or,

• 45:03Nilay Patel?

  you know, they roll out their Alexa update and it doesn't work on the old Play One, so you gotta buy a Sonos one. But it's a hardware business that they're in. They're licensing out the software to make receivers do this. Now they're in a software licensing business and those margins are weird. Also, you know, their hardware will be competitive with other people's hardware that runs Sonos. Like, that becomes a much more complicated business to be in. Because this is effectively the OS for streaming music in your house. But what I will say is that for a decade, I have bought Pioneer equipment. Ankiyo owns Pioneer. And I just bought not Pioneer stuff. I bought a Denon. Denon has their own broke-ass Sonos competitor called HEOS. This is true. Yeah, it's a whole, there's a whole line, H-E-O-S.

• 45:48Nilay Patel?

  It's awful, all caps, of course. And you can buy weird HEOS speakers through your house, it's a whole thing. And I'm never gonna do that shit.

• 45:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:58Nilay Patel?

  And so, but because they have it, they're never gonna do this Sonos thing. Because then you won't buy their broke-ass HEOS speaker.

• 46:05Speaker 04

  Just give up.

• 46:06Nilay Patel?

  Just gotta throw it away. But anyway, I'm actually very happy about this. I think Sonos saying, okay, we're gonna be the layer for music and all these devices. And we're gonna expand this ecosystem is the only way they can compete with Amazon. And their soundbar is leaking all over the place. I think they're finally realizing that they're, they need to compete. And they're moving a lot faster than Sonos ever before. But come on, man. I just bought the thing.

• 46:29Speaker 04

  I'm so sorry.

• 46:29Nilay Patel?

  After, anyway. Sorry, Nilay. Here's one. New Wi-Fi standard to let different mesh routers work together. Do you believe this will ever happen?

• 46:38Speaker 04

  I feel like there will be three companies that will support it. And then there will probably be important companies that don't support it. That you will prefer their mesh routers.

• 46:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's like, will Eero let Linksys add on to an Eero system?

• 46:54Speaker 04

  I mean, it really sounds nice. I'm in a real, I'm a real situation where I have my own Wi-Fi router and my roommate has his own Wi-Fi router.

• 47:02Nilay Patel?

  How did you end up in that one?

• 47:04Speaker 04

  Because we have a railroad-style apartment that is just

• 47:07Nilay Patel?

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 47:08Speaker 04

  not a good layout. You can't, you can't get, we also have the backyard and we also smoke out front all the time. So we have really, we have a real long situation. And you can't just put a Wi-Fi router in the middle of our house and have it work in the backyard and in the front.

• 47:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:27Speaker 04

  So now he has the room in the front. So my, when I like, when I'm walking towards my house, my phone jumps on his Wi-Fi network. And so by the time I'm in my room, my phone's having trouble using Wi-Fi because it's on his Wi-Fi network. I don't know. So anyways, all that to say.

• 47:44Nilay Patel?

  Aren't there hundreds of products now that can solve this problem?

• 47:46Speaker 04

  I clearly need a mesh network system. But it's like, if these were interoperable, he could buy his own mesh router. I could buy my own mesh router and they would work together. And then if we ever like break up his roommates, we still have useful components for our future mesh networks.

• 48:05Nilay Patel?

  Eero, and he could buy his own Eero. You're saying you don't want to like force him into an ecosystem?

• 48:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:11Nilay Patel?

  This is horrible. Every Vergecast comes back to the same problem. The network effects of ecosystems.

• 48:19Nilay Patel?

  This episode of Vergecast is brought to you by IBM. We live in a world that's creating AI-enabled everything, a world with more IoT devices than people. Today, technology has never been smarter, but smart only matters when you put it to work where it matters. When we put smart to work, we can help save species, increase crop yields, and make progress, not just for a few of us, but for all of us. So let's get to it. Let's put smart to work. Find out how at ibm.com/smart. Okay, we're back from the ad. Let's make fun of the HTC phone.

• 48:43Speaker 04

  Okay, well, first, let's do a segment that I do every week.

• 48:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh, man, we're really making people wait for it.

• 48:49Speaker 04

  It's called, "Please Don't Block My Chain."

• 48:52Nilay Patel?

  Oh.

• 48:52Speaker 04

  Look, HTC officially announces a new blockchain power phone. That was the whole point.

• 48:59Speaker 04

  I was just mad at you. Put my segment, which rarely happens, into the official list of real news.

• 49:08Nilay Patel?

  This has got to be the silliest news of the week.

• 49:09Speaker 04

  Well, so I think it's silly, but it's also, I'm very interested and excited about, obviously, there's a lot of buzz and that makes it really frustrating and difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. But I do think there's something very fundamentally interesting about Bitcoin and Ethereum. And one of the biggest barriers to the whole ecosystem is the problem of where you keep your private key, right? So all a Bitcoin wallet is, is basically a string of random numbers that you dreamed up, that you can prove ownership over, you can prove that you generated them because you know this private key.

• 49:54Speaker 04

  If anybody else gets your private key, they have your money. So, and so, but the private key is always going to be like longer than an easy to remember password, if it's going to be secure. And so you have to find a way to securely store the thing that could get access to all your money. I don't know if a phone is the right way to do that, but there's also other interesting things, like if you can securely like hold on to your private keys, there's something called local Bitcoin. People, you don't have to use the actual Bitcoin network or the blockchain ledger to transfer Bitcoins. You can just trade somebody a private key.

• 50:37Speaker 04

  So there's other interesting like offline things that can happen, that can happen. But basically, a huge problem with technologies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are usability. And the biggest usability problem is key management. And I have no idea how this phone might do it, but were this phone to have a good solution for private key management, that would be a good thing in the world.

• 51:02Nilay Patel?

  So, those are some good ideas. Here are HTC's ideas. To start with, the Exodus phone, the phone's called Exodus, will support for Bitcoin, Ethereum and other major networks, with more partnerships expected to come later. HTC envisions a native blockchain network that uses Exodus phones as nodes to support cryptocurrency trading between users. This, to me, sounds like it's going to be doing some compute. Because it has to in order to validate exchanges, which is why I said I think the battery life is going to be terrible. HTC is also reportedly allowing, considering people, to purchase the phone of cryptocurrency, which has nothing to do with the phone. You can just buy anything with cryptocurrency. So their whole idea is they're going to build a network that's centered on the phone

• 51:47Nilay Patel?

  in some way. And that, to me, seems like they're an iced tea company that put blockchain in their name.

• 51:53Speaker 04

  Well, that's what I said.

• 51:54Nilay Patel?

  In order to generate some nonsense.

• 51:55Speaker 04

  You mean the drink, not iced tea. Okay.

• 52:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:01Speaker 04

  Cryptocurrency trading between users. That's why I was saying if it's something like local Bitcoin, if all it is is phones in like a one-to-one setting facilitating a secure exchange of keys, then that might be like the nice thing to have. Because the problem with local Bitcoin is muggings. So that's what, that was my optimistic spin on what that could be. If they, if they're, if they're just going to make their own coin and call it HTC, HD coin.

• 52:37Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 52:38Speaker 04

  It's a bad idea.

• 52:39Nilay Patel?

  Poor HTC. My tweet about this was how many times can HTC kill itself? All right. Last few things. Paul, you, you mentioned your Electron piece earlier. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Because H, Microsoft put out a new Surface Hub 2, which looks amazing. It's like a giant TV computer that you can rotate from portrait to landscape in meetings. I will say every time Microsoft puts out one of these things, they show off meetings that look like the best fucking meetings in the world. And like, no meeting, like, I have sat here being like, I'm going to buy a Surface Hub 2. You know, it has a camera on top so you can video conference with somebody who's like the size of a real person. And I just imagine me and Dieter just having those meetings all day long. Like, that seems amazing. And then I, I kept on trying to think, why would I ever rotate this from portrait to

• 53:24Nilay Patel?

  landscape? And my entire workday now is just going to be finding reasons to rotate giant displays. But, so that, that's Microsoft. They're also thinking about new, reportedly thinking about new, cheaper Surface tablets.

• 53:35Speaker 03

  Microsoft's really pushing ahead with desktop computing in this way after, you know, all this stuff happening with Windows. Like, they're trying to put computing in new form factors.

• 53:43Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 53:44Speaker 03

  But your point in your piece was that all of desktop computing is moving to Electron, which is sort of undifferentiating all this hardware.

• 53:53Speaker 04

  Or a very significant portion. I just feel like, to Microsoft's credit, Microsoft has done the most as far as I can tell. So Electron is, basically, uses parts from Chrome to allow people to make something that's kind of like a website, kind of like a web server, and package it together, basically using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to make a desktop application. And those desktop applications are very portable, and they work very well, in my experience, on Mac, Windows, and Linux, which is something that's very hard to do otherwise. So now that Chrome OS is supporting Linux applications, I discovered myself, I'm

• 54:33Speaker 04

  just installing Electron applications. And it's so silly, because Chrome OS has a really great Chrome browser, but it's, that's not the Chrome browser that I'm getting in Electron apps, because it's re-packaged and it's not accelerated right now in Chrome OS, all that stuff. And I just like, I've, I've been a complainer about Electron. I feel like a lot of Electron apps are inefficient and slow and are like Slack. It's sad. But, at this point, it's very clear that developers want to do this. And they want to make cross-platform applications. It's happening on mobile, too, to a huge extent. They want to make cross-platform applications using web technologies.

• 55:15Speaker 03

  My big question here is, aren't progressive web apps so supposed to solve some of the problems with Electron because they use the operating system's native HTML renderer? Is Electron better than progressive web apps because you can have some of that extra server stuff attached to the app in a way that you can't really do with a PWA?

• 55:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, progressive web apps are, see, now, this is a really interesting, like, a twist to the open web thing. Progressive web apps are going to be limited by the particular operating system's support for progressive web app standards. But also, the amount of stuff that they can do in the backend, like, I use Visual Studio Code, which is an Electron app. And, you know, it can, it uses like Microsoft's compiler technologies to like look over your JavaScript and like hint like new things to you. And it could do, and it like knows the Git status of your different files. It's doing a lot of backend work that wouldn't really work in a progressive web app.

• 56:16Speaker 04

  You basically, uh, Electron apps are based on Node.js, which is a way to basically talk to Linux or a Linux-like computer, which has been adapted to also work on the Mac and Windows from JavaScript. So you can basically do anything a computer can do. And progressive web apps, while they're getting way better, are really far from being able to touch your file system in that sort of way. At the same time, there are a lot of Electron apps that could very easily just be progressive web apps right now.

• 56:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It just seems like the idea, I was telling Paul this before we came on the air. My mother-in-law was visiting to like help the baby, it was great. I was really helpful to have her around. But she has this like ancient Lenovo PC. It's horrible. And I was like, I'm just, I'm gonna do the same thing I did with my mom, I'm just gonna get you a Chromebook. I'll get you a Pixelbook, it'd be great. And she's got one nasty Windows app that she needs to use for work.

• 57:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:13Nilay Patel?

  And it's just the grossest app. And they didn't build a web portal for it, which it should. I just like looked at the app for five minutes, I was like, why isn't this just a website? And there's a mobile app, but it only runs on the iPhone. It doesn't run on the iPad. So if I had bought her an iPad, I was like, just use websites and then like use this one app. She'd have to like blow it up from the, it's horrible. You can't. You want to have a good relationship with your mother-in-law and like being like, "Please use this blown-up iPhone app for your job" is like a bad way to start that off. So like, she's gotta have a Windows PC.

• 57:46Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 57:46Nilay Patel?

  But if that app was an Electron app, I could do any kinds of, I could get her a Mac.

• 57:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:52Nilay Patel?

  Right? I could get her a Chromebook and install Linux on it.

• 57:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:55Nilay Patel?

  There's like, there's like just this, this broader range of hardware.

• 57:59Speaker 04

  Which is becoming way easier now.

• 58:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And that, to me, that is both the promise for the user, but it's absolute peril for these desktop hardware manufacturers, right? Like if, I think John Greber has written about this a lot. If all the Mac becomes is the best host for Electron apps, then Apple's advantage starts to slip away.

• 58:19Speaker 04

  It does, and I don't know, it's, it's just, I mean, it's kind of frustrating to me, but at the same time, there are aspects where I do think they can compete in the sense that if, if a desktop vendor was making, because you know, Electron still touches a lot of the Chrome, like Electron can be, you know, in your menu bar. Electron can use like a lot of native features like Touch Bar and stuff like that. If companies like Apple and Microsoft were putting their best, hottest new APIs in a very easy-to-use way, so Electron developers are getting like the baby's first Touch Bar experience with Electron, maybe they could turn it into a selling point. I also think that, this is kind of a tangent, but the stuff that Google's doing of sort

• 59:03Speaker 04

  of decomposing an application where it's running in Linux, but it's viewed in Chrome OS, kind of like, it's not actually a browser tab, but it's kind of like a browser tab. It might solve your, I forget exactly your relation to this person.

• 59:18Nilay Patel?

  My mother-in-law?

• 59:19Speaker 04

  Your mother-in-law.

• 59:20Nilay Patel?

  That's an important one.

• 59:23Nilay Patel?

  Yes, my child's grandmother.

• 59:24Speaker 04

  It might solve your child's grandmother's problem if Google went all the way with it, because you could just say, "Hey, Google, install this EXE in your cloud and let me use this EXE from any browser tab anywhere."

• 59:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:41Speaker 04

  Google does a lot of that, and all the cloud providers do a lot of that stuff for enterprise, but consumers don't have a lot of that experience.

• 59:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just, but even that is like one step too much of like, personal management of applications in that way, like. That company that makes that app, they should do that, right? It should be more incumbent on them to address a wider range of endpoints than for one person to be like, "In order to get away from this nasty Lenovo notebook, I will now build a cloud server to run one EXE." Like, that... You have to, like, really hate an app to do that.

• 1:00:18Speaker 04

  But do you trust this company to do all that work?

• 1:00:22Nilay Patel?

  Look, we're all just gonna live in pods anyway. Just give up the trust.

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  I just think, you know, because I'm putting these Linux applications on this Pixelbook for like, the millionth time, like, I've been doing this so many times. Every time I have a new computer, I like, spit up a new cloud instance, or I install the applications natively. It's like, I need Visual Studio Code, and I need Rust, and I need Node, and all these things. It's just like, you know, the backend of this could be kind of abstracted away in my... I feel like you could Chrome OS-ify a desktop operating system a lot better. I know Microsoft is doing a lot of stuff with, like, containers and putting applications in containers. I've been reading up on Docker, learning what Docker is.

• 1:01:07Nilay Patel?

  It's all over.

• 1:01:08Speaker 04

  Scuber, that is...

• 1:01:09Nilay Patel?

  No, we can't, we can't. We're done here.

• 1:01:11Speaker 04

  I think there's a world of server administration and enterprise application usage that I think some consumers, maybe myself, could benefit from.

• 1:01:20Nilay Patel?

  And there's a world in which the second Docker is mentioned on this podcast, but we shut it the hell down.

• 1:01:27Nilay Patel?

  No, if you're Docker'd, then you're doing just the Lord's work out there. Okay, I think that's it. We're a little over time. I got a baby to get back to. I want to tell you all, real quick before we go, Andy Hawkins, our great transportation reporter, interviewed the CEO of Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi. I got that wrong. But he interviewed him. Yes, you did. He said... Do you know it, Teeter? No, I'm not gonna try. I'm not either. But Dara, CEO of Uber, it's on our website, great photos, by the way, says, "Future won't just be cars." Exclusive interview, please go read it. Andy did a great job. He's been working at Beat for a long time. A lot going on with that. Please check it out. Want you to read that. Check out the last episode of season two, "Why Did You Push That Button?" That's great. Again, congrats, Ashley and Caitlin.

• 1:02:12Nilay Patel?

  Subscribe to Converge with Casey Newton. That show's gonna be a ton of fun. And you can listen to other stuff. You can listen to Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. You can listen to Recode Pete, Recode Peter. Recode Media. With Peter Kafka. It should just be called Recode Peter. It should be called Recode Kara and Recode Peter. Like, that should be the show. They're both great shows, great to listen to. We'll be back next week with more Vergecast. Oh, by the way, you should watch Processor with one Mr. Dieter Bone. Dieter, would you like to tell the people about your YouTube titling fiasco?

• 1:02:40Speaker 03

  Oh, so the last episode was about why you should try to have a custom case. We talked to Ashley Carmen, which is great because she has a million just bonkers cases. But she has a really good attitude towards them and has really good, like, reasons for why you might want a bonkers case. So I talked about that. Anyway, so in my head, I was like, oh, well, this video is about the best case for you because like you should have a case that feels custom to you in some way. But everyone just read it as the best case and forgot the for you part. And they were real mad at me that I didn't tell them what the best case was because that's all anybody really wants to know. So we changed the YouTube title. Sorry about that, everybody. I wasn't trying to trick anybody.

• 1:03:21Nilay Patel?

  You can watch Dieter in a backyard sand down an iPhone case, which is A+.

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:25Nilay Patel?

  All right, that was Vergecast. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week. Rock and roll.

• 1:03:28Speaker 03

  Paul. Yanni.

• 1:03:30Nilay Patel?

  Promo code.

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

  Or was it Laurel?

• 1:03:32Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God.

• 1:03:33Speaker 04

  Yami.

• 1:03:34Nilay Patel?

  You can hear them both.

• 1:03:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can hear them both.

• 1:03:36Nilay Patel?

  It's super easy to hear them both.

• 1:03:37Speaker 04

  None of the words are Yanni, it's Yami.

• 1:03:40Nilay Patel?

  Okay, you should stop the rails. Goodbye.

• 1:04:01Nilay Patel?

  This episode of the Vergecast was brought to you by IBM. By the end of this podcast, nearly 10,000 new malware variants will have been launched. But now AI can help protect your data from threats wherever it lives with IBM Security. Let's put smart to work. Learn more at ibm.com/smart.